I finally got around to reading this lengthy article by Matthew Frank from #LetterBoxd from 2025-11-12. It talks about the decline of movie theaters, documents several anecdotes of movie-goers telling these theaters exactly what they want, and then ends with... begging Hollywood to go against its own interests? Huh?
The tl;dr of my commentary is that movie theaters don't sell screenings. They sell third spaces. The screening is just the cherry that makes you go there instead of anywhere else. If movie theaters want to survive, then they need to re-organize around that fact, and soon.
https://letterboxd.com/email/crowd-pleaser/2025-11-12-cp/
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>“Movie theaters are basically a dying art because of streaming. Streaming is killing the movie industry, and not just us. All movie theaters are struggling,” Ann says.
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>“Streaming is making people want to sit at home,” Ann says. “Economics affect that. Right now, I think people are afraid of everything going on in the world and our country, and I think they’re holding on to their money. And that’s why I keep doing all these, instead of just movies, events.”
Streaming offers an effectively unlimited buffet of content, each month, for the price of a *single* screening at a movie theater, *before* food/concessions. If movie theaters are to persist, then the revenue model has to change. Those tickets have to be a couple bucks at most, and the producers and theaters have to hammer out a revenue-sharing agreement that works (assuming the producers even want to keep distributing their work in theaters at all).
>“You can wait a month and watch it at home,” Kris says.
Ah yes. It's not that ticket prices are too high. It's "exclusivity" that's to blame. Folks, believe it or not, nobody goes to a movie theater to watch movies. They go to a theater to *commune around* the movies. If exclusivity was to blame, then no non-exclusive screening would ever sell.
>In addition to the uniform consensus that Discount Tuesdays, when tickets are typically 50 percent off, are the hottest time of the week, every employee at virtually every type of theater will answer the question of “Who mainly comes here?” with the same answer: old people and families.
I rest my case. You're not selling screenings. You're selling a third space.
>Back when he was growing up in Boone County, Nick would come twice a week with his aunts, and he misses the feeling of a packed theater. Now Nick and Ivory’s son “loves it,” he says, and when the family comes, they try to book a row without any other people in it because of how he runs around during films.
I said I rest my case.
>The thing that’s holding them back, like many families, is the absurd cost of a trip to the multiplex. “Popcorn and two drinks cost us almost $30. It really adds up fast,” he says. “And tickets, I don’t know how to keep up with the prices on them because today I bought them for $12.50 apiece, and other times I come, they’re $24.”
You're not going to get back to the halcyon days of making large sums of money from the movie alone. Adapt or die.
>Rather than going to see a movie in the theater, like the Fiesta Theatre in Colorado (pictured left, with manager Jordan), consumers are buying popcorn from their local venues—like the “Party Popcorn” concession that’s sold for takeout-only at Legacy Theatres (right)—to bring the experience home.
Hoo-Lee-Crap the theater industry cannot be this dense! The customer is literally telling you why they're showing up! It's not the fucking movie!
>At a northeast Cinemark, I asked one of the employees how often people order their delivery. “Every day. You’d be surprised,” he tells me. “Most of the time, they get popcorn. Sometimes they get nachos. Sometimes they get a hot dog.”
Guysguysguysguys you're running a restaurant, a third space, with movies as the cherry on top that other third spaces lack.
>But mostly, Gary wants to talk about the history of the Lyric. Every nook and cranny of this place has a story from the nearly 50 years his family has owned it. The most evocative: Up in the balcony, an unstable man once strapped an M80 firecracker to a pigeon he’d brought in. When the man set the pigeon loose, it thought the screen light was outdoors and flew straight into it, causing the pigeon to explode in the middle of the audience.
Well, it *is* Texas, I guess.
>So Hollywood: don’t read this as an obituary. Read it as a to-do list. The crowd is waiting; the doors are open. Now give them something worth leaving the couch for—and price it so they can come back next week.
Perhaps theaters should look beyond Hollywood for what they project on their screens. Hollywood sees streaming as their way of cutting out the theater middle-men.
#movies #MovieTheaters #MovieTheatres #streaming
