The cast and crew of Anora, including Alex Coco, Mikey Madison, Sean Baker, Yura Borisov, and Mark Eydelshteyn, accept the Best Picture award at the 97th Annual Oscars. Photo / Getty Images
We know video killed the radio star – but what exactly has led to the death of cinemas?
References to the plight of brick-and-mortar movie theatres were littered throughout the Oscars coverage.
Host Conan O’Brien at one point even mocked streaming culture with a sketch introducing the new idea of a “building for movies” and getting people to “stream movies in a theatre”.
“Are you tired of streaming movies from your couch, from your kitchen, and from your hand?” he quipped.
Anora director Sean Baker used his acceptance speech for Best Director as a battle cry: “Keep making films for the big screen. I know I will,” he urged.
“Where did we fall in love with the movies?” he said, “At the movie theatre.
“We can laugh together, cry together, and, in a time in which the world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever. It’s a communal experience you don’t get at home. And right now, the theatre-going experience is under threat.”
It’s not just in the US – where thousands of movie screens have closed since 2020 - that there have been fewer bums on seats at the cinema.
NZ cinema chain Silky Otter said just last year the market was about 25% below what it was in 2019, pre-Covid.
Auckland’s Capitol cinema co-owner Roger Wyllie told The Front Page the decline is due to a culmination of things – including the pandemic, cost of living, and the types of films being produced.
“It’s the themes that they explore. Independent films have been known to be darker, thought-provoking, questioning ideals or pushing boundaries. My thoughts are that audiences are so emotionally drained from the everyday, everything that’s going on in the world, that they don’t want to come and see these films.
“They want to escape. They want to go back to the Barbie and Oppenheimer days when it was fun to go and see a film that took them out of their day-to-day experiences – which is why, when you go back to the Great Depression, cinema had this huge resurgence. It was seen as an escape from everything,” he said.
Wyllie said there aren’t enough mid-budget comedies that sit in the middle between the indie and the big studio films.
In the 2000s, films like Meet the Parents and My Big Fat Greek Wedding were some of the highest-grossing the years they hit the big screen. Twenty-four years later, the only movie that wasn’t a sequel in last year’s top 10 was Wicked.
“Netflix is producing films that are just going straight to the Netflix service. It’ll go to cinemas, and then two weeks later it’s on digital – platforms like Netflix, Amazon or Disney+. The window has changed from being a four-week exclusive in the cinema, where you had to see it first. Even that’s now eroded,” Wyllie said.
Cost-of-living pressures have also contributed to a decline in patronage.
“What we notice is people are buying tickets, but they’re not spending when they go to the cinema.
“Cinemas can’t make their money on ticket sales alone, but by what people purchase across the bar,” he said.
So, what could bring people back to the cinema? Wyllie had a sombre solution.
“I don’t think anything. I think it’s too late now.
“We’ve gone through nearly three years of people getting used to watching films at home on their streaming services. We’ve now got an economic climate that it’s great.
“I think cinemas actually have to start looking at what they can bring to get audience in a different way. We started something called Pitchblack Playback, where once a month we have listening experiences in the dark where you come in and listen to an album through the Dolby sound system.
“That’s how we’ve worked our way through these times is coming up with different ideas. We’ve had comedians trying out new material. You’ve got to think outside the square,” Wyllie said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about how local cinemas are trying to claw back audiences.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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