The pandemic undeniably changed certain aspects of our at-home movie viewing habits — some for the better, and in ways that are poised to last a while. Major studios and theater chains have agreed to permanently reduce the amount of time between when a movie hits theaters and when it reaches streaming platforms. Some distributors may also decide to stick to day-and-date releases, where a movie arrives in theaters and on streaming at the same time. It makes sense to give audiences options.
It sucks. But the impending death of the movie theater has been attributed to streaming services almost as long as streaming services have existed, despite evidence that people who stream more also go to cinemas more.
It was a replacement for everything. When the first movie theaters opened in , the reason to visit was simple: to watch a movie. If you wanted to see a film, you had to go to the place where the film was playing. Eventually, technological advances brought new options for at-home entertainment.
And as they changed and evolved, so too did the reasons to venture out. If you loved Titanic when it came out in and wanted to see it again before its arrival on home video — on not one but two VHS tapes, nine months after its theatrical premiere — you had to go to the theater. Even as DVDs and then Blu-rays became commonplace, and streaming services arrived in the late aughts, the reasons for going to a movie theater remained about the same.
It was something to do. Going to the movies was fun and relatively cheap. A movie theater was a good place to go on a date or with someone you wanted to date.
There were blockbuster releases and goofy comedies and horror movies to see. For a whole lot of people, movie theaters were knit into our lives. What about in ? Why go to movie theaters in a post-pandemic world? I talked to folks from all kinds of backgrounds across the US and the UK to try to answer this question, and I got a bunch of different responses.
But what most people told me, after a year of watching movies only at home, is that they go to theaters for three reasons. One, they want to be around other people. The danger of being around other people is the whole reason movie theaters were shut down in the first place. But seeing a film as part of an audience is part of what makes the moviegoing experience so fun.
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Customer experience. Actually, the answer may be yes. Read more on Customer experience or related topics Market research , Business models and Web-based technologies. Michael D. On Christmas Day, the biggest Hollywood movie of the year will debut online.
In the US, Wonder Woman —the sequel to the superhero blockbuster Wonder Woman —will be available to subscribers of the HBO Max streaming service on the same day it premieres in theaters. So instead of watching it on the big screen, where virtually all films of its kind have been seen throughout history, most American audiences will just cozy up on their couches and hit play.
Instead, it saw an opportunity to boost its fledgling streaming platform. This month, it announced that all of its films will follow the same path as Wonder Woman : simultaneous releases in theaters and on HBO Max.
For an industry that for a century was built on the primacy of movie theaters, the news was earth-shattering. Your membership supports a team of global Quartz journalists reporting on the forces shaping our world. We make sense of accelerating change and help you get ahead of it with business news for the next era, not just the next hour.
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