Are Cinemas Heading for Extinction? I Hope Not.
Ben Cottingham| 23rd of July 2015
Dear readers, I feel obliged to tell you that the tone of this article is a little more serious than my usual fare, but only because it discusses something close to my heart… Cinema. Note. Cinema, not film. These things are not the same! Now the eagle-eyed among you would notice the odd reference to people in cinemas in my other writing, and this is because I am one of those people! Since I was 16 I’ve been working at my local cinema, and frankly I’ve loved every second. Now. Onto the article!
What I wish to discuss here, albeit briefly, is the idea that fewer and fewer of us are visiting cinemas across the country in favour of staying home for what the kids call ‘Netflix and chill’… Now my job is to try to show you what a crying shame this is, and convince you to venture out of your collective man-caves/teenager-pits and partake in what I believe to be an institution, the cinema.
Obviously, there are pros and cons to each side of this argument, I can’t deny that… But what I want to convince you of is that it isn’t a case of one or the other, but a case for both. Because I believe there is something magical about the cinema!
There’s something special about the entire experience, the bright lights of the refreshments counter, the food and drink large enough to feed a small nation, and the satisfaction of dropping into those big comfy seats as the lights go down. Just on a technical front, going to the cinema is a marvel, with top of the line surround sound, and screens tens of feet across. This goes through the roof if you’re lucky enough to visit an IMAX, where the feeling of immersion is just unreal. For me, lying in bed watching a film on my laptop is just a world away. I mean, I understand the appeal, you have to put on pants to go to the cinema, and that sucks, but to me it’s worth it!
Big enough to feed a small nation... Photo credit: Craig Michaud
But I can hear you reader, I can hear you shouting ‘but it’s so expensive to go to the cinema’, and in part, you’re right. It does cost more if you go on a peak price day, and buy a large popcorn and drink for everyone in your family, but most cinemas offer fantastic prices on ‘saverdays’ or through schemes like Meerkat Movies (buy one get one free). To be honest, food at cinemas only costs what it does because it costs so much to rent the film for showings, if cinemas could charge less, they would!
To see the other side of this coin, Netflix (or other streaming services) charge a monthly fee of around £10, and offer films released a few months before hand. I think this is great, but what about the new releases, the blockbuster films? If you’re the kind of person whose satisfied watching a pirated copy, shaky and tinny, with that one fat dude getting up to pee every ten minutes, then I frankly don’t want to talk to you, because that isn’t cool. It damages the film industry from the ground up, not the actors, or the directors or the production studios, but lower down. If cinema admissions drop, the staff get fewer hours work, if they get fewer hours work they get paid less, and if admits drop further then the cinema could even be shut down. Now I know that’s a pretty dramatic tone, but it’s true, and I’m sure the same is true for those people who share passwords on Netflix, these actions have much wider implications than we perhaps realise...
Now this has got deep, I see that, but when we’re discussing the death of cinema I had no doubt it would get sombre, because it comes down to you. It's down to you to think about how you watch films, to think about how you can make a difference and how you can enjoy film and cinema in a way that pays off for everyone!
So there we have it, my rather biased discussion on the trials and tribulations of cinema-goers and workers, those who prefer the comfort of their own home and those unscrupulous people cutting corners to get a pretty dismal experience. I can’t tell you all to go to your local cinema to see something new, but I can tell you that it isn’t always as expensive as you might think. And if that’s your only problem, then let’s try to do something about it!
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