Movie theater attendance has been trending downward for years. The more popular explanations: People don’t go to theaters because they can see movies in their fabulous home-entertainment centers. They stay away because they’re angry over the ads and the price for popcorn. The most quoted reason is that the new movies are lousy. No one wants to see them.
I have my theory, and it’s none of the above. The drop in attendance is not about what’s playing in the theaters, the popcorn concession or the facilities at home. It’s the theaters themselves.
One recalls the famous line in “Sunset Boulevard.” A guy says to the aging movie star Norma Desmond, “You used to be big.” Desmond responds: “I’m still big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Today, the pictures are still big. It’s the movie theaters that got small. Long gone are the Odeons, the Capitols and the Majestics. Their cherubs and lush drapery decay in landfills, and their Mighty Wurlitzers play for the angels. A few survivors have been promoted to “performing-arts centers,” but the palace as movie theater is history.
Half the fun was sitting in those wedding-cake decors – which made up for the fact that the other half may have been a clunker like “Bewitched.” Sometime in the 1960s, a developer with no sense of humor decided that the movie-going experience should take place in a box on a shopping strip. The multiplex was born. The multiplexes multiplied, pulling the plug on the Orpheums then holding up the increasingly seedy downtowns. No one really liked going to the warren of cells that now passed for movie theaters, but that was the only place to see a movie – until the home options arrived.
So there is some truth to the idea that DVD players, cable movie channels, TiVo and Netflix have been taking business from movie theaters. But they are competing against the coal- mine shafts at the multiplexes, not the grand old Paramounts.
My TV at home is a 27-inch number and not flat. I play panoramic Westerns on that pathetic little set rather than venture to the multiplex, where screens are a lot bigger but still unworthy of the Grand Tetons. If I’m going to compromise, let me compromise in comfort, away from untamed cellphones and flu germs of others.
People want to stay at home these days? Not true, if they have someplace to go. Look at the crowds hanging around the malls on a Saturday night. Folks are there for the spectacle. If there were spectacular theaters, people would go to them more often.
Theater operators, like bad retailers, forget that going out is an experience. That’s the only sane explanation for why suburbanites would drive an hour through mean traffic, then pay $20 for parking and $75 each for theater tickets to see a Broadway show: It’s a wow of an experience. The show is live, the theaters are architectural gems, and for a couple of hours, you become part of a perfumed audience.
A few multiplex operators are trying to bring a little glamour back into movie-going. They serve wine and shrimp. (If these guys charge $5 for a Coke, imagine what a Chardonnay costs.) Too bad they killed off the real thing on Main Street.
Do I know for certain that lots of people would drive downtown and pay for parking to watch Batman in a resurrected Paramount palace? I do not.
But I would. And until I have that option, most of my movie watching will remain at home. And the only phone ringing will be mine.
