The Future of Movie Theaters Is Bright (and Also Concerning)

Intro: Rejecting The Wisdom of Crowds

Sometimes a stock price accurately reflects future business prospects, a product of the wisdom of crowds and what those crowds expect for an entire sector of the economy. When that’s the case, I tend to put a lot of faith in the market. And yet, just as easily, I’ll dismiss a stock price the moment it contradicts one of my irrational beliefs.

Such is the case with AMC Theatres, America’s largest theatrical exhibitor, whose share price fell to an all-time low this year as it nears penny-stock territory.

At a high level, this price point makes sense. Theatrical moviegoing was weakened by the pandemic and still hasn’t returned to pre-2020 levels. Meanwhile, national chains like AMC and Regal took on substantial debt to survive the downturn.

And yet, for some reason, I remain bullish on the future of movie theaters. Not because I expect some triumphant resurgence in traditional moviegoing, but because the purpose of these brick-and-mortar fun houses is beginning to evolve.

The past five years have seen significant experimentation in the type of content that belongs on the big screen: a members-only screening of Netflix’s Stranger Things finale, the release of Taylor Swift music videos, or the premiere of an anime TV episode. Increasingly, movie theaters are becoming venues for more than traditional moviegoing.

So today, we’ll explore the evolution of the movie theater as it shifts from a conventional cineplex into a physical hub for cultural experience.

The Future of Movie Theaters

The past few months saw the highest summer box office on record, a data point amplified across all entertainment trade publications as proof of a moviegoing renaissance. And while movies are “so back,” this revival is grossly overstated thanks to inflation—a phenomenon that is conveniently overlooked when it serves a reporter’s best interest.

When we look at tickets sold (a metric agnostic to ticket pricing), theater foot traffic is down and to the right, following a middling post-pandemic recovery.

Right now, these record box office figures are driven by rising costs and the popularity of high-priced IMAX tickets—so it’s not all bad (but it’s also not an unambiguous triumph).

There are indeed bright spots: the growth in premium formats (IMAX, Dolby, and 4DX), the success of YouTube creators, horror’s continued dominance, and, most pertinent to this essay, the rise of “event cinema.”

Post-pandemic, these event releases account for 7% of North American box office, up from 0.5% of grosses in 2016.

You’re probably looking at this graph and thinking:

1. So cool—people are going to the movies for events!
2. What qualifies as an event?

To simplify matters, we’ll consider something “event” programming if it was produced and distributed outside the traditional studio or independent film model, or if it originally debuted years ago and is now returning to theaters.

So what exactly falls into this category? Event programming includes faith-based films, theatrical extensions of anime TV franchises, repertory re-releases, streaming service one-offs, concert films, and one-night live events, with each format expanding its theatrical footprint over the past half-decade.

To get a more granular sense of these categories, we’ll examine the highest-grossing movie-theater events of the past decade, a roster led by the improbable faith-based blockbuster Sound of Freedom, which made millions through an elaborate game of movie-ticket tag, and Taylor Swift projects that bypassed traditional distributors altogether.

We’ll start with faith-based films, a rapidly expanding cohort of movies and independent studios that I was initially hesitant to include in this event programming category. In terms of format, these are simply movies; what sets them apart is their content and marketing.

These are stories and themes that traditional studios avoid, and the promotion of these films is often unique, whether it’s Sound of Freedom and its “buy a ticket for someone else” gimmick or the grassroots church promotion many of these films rely on. Since The Passion of the Christ debuted in 2004, this category has continued to expand. For anyone who follows the box office, you’ll typically see one or two of these films among the highest-grossing releases for a given week.

Next, there are repertory screenings, essentially a fancy term for bringing older movies back to theaters.

For a long time, Disney was virtually the only studio using this tactic, selectively re-releasing its classics for new generations of moviegoers.

But the average repertory release is changing, with adult-oriented movies like Interstellar returning to theaters in a gambit seemingly aimed at movie nerds rather than children.

I’ve gone to a few of these repertory screenings, and I’m always struck by how young the audiences are. There is something uniquely disorienting about sitting in a theater full of 21-year-olds watching a 30-year-old Taiwanese film.

And at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from decades-old Taiwanese films is Netflix pop trash.

Netflix, a streamer whose entire business model is built around driving movie theaters into the ground, is now experimenting with one-off theatrical releases. The twist is that Netflix is capitalizing on existing fandom, event-izing the Stranger Things finale or a KPop Demon Hunters sing-along to squeeze a few more dollars from its most committed subscribers.

Put differently, these screenings are less about expanding Netflix’s user base than finding new ways to extract revenue from the customers it already has. That could become an increasingly important strategy as subscriber growth across streaming continues to slow.

Perhaps the unifying theme across all event programming is the monetization of fandom. Industry executives are using the big screen to pull more dollars from audiences with an existing affinity for a piece of content, including:

• Someone with dedicated faith
• Taylor Swift’s rabid fan base
• A cinephile completionist making their way through Letterboxd’s list of top movies
• A Netflix subscriber who loves Stranger Things but is also unwilling to pay $10 more per month for the service

After years of making content cheaper and more accessible through streaming platforms, entertainment executives have rediscovered the movie theater as a way to juice earnings. The future of entertainment is a reinvention of its past.

All told, the entertainment industry’s rediscovery of event programs and fandom activations could grow to be somewhere between 12% and 20% of the box office by 2040, or that number could just as easily be zero. I truly have no idea, but this is the best I can do using the practice of statistics.

Whether that 20% grows overall box office or merely claims a larger share of a shrinking market remains to be seen. So, too, does the future of AMC Theatres, a prospective penny stock that could reach zero well before 2040.

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Final Thoughts: The Physical Culture Fun House

Businesses typically consolidate as demand shrinks, forcing companies to merge and, sometimes, blurring the boundaries between once-distinct industries. Take, for example, Sears-Kmart, which was born of the department store’s decline. Or iHeartMedia, which accumulated a massive radio station portfolio as streaming grew and advertising dollars migrated elsewhere.

A similar dynamic is now playing out across physical culture. The death of the video store, record store, local movie theater, mom-and-pop bookstore, corporate bookstore, stationery store, video-game retailer, and novelty store has spurred consolidation across myriad cultural domains into a new brick-and-mortar hybrid: The Physical Culture Fun House. Perhaps the foremost example of this phenomenon is the American bookseller Barnes & Noble (and its UK equivalent, Waterstones).

Against all odds, Barnes & Noble is growing, relaunching multiple storefronts within driving distance of my house. I assure you that last sentence is no hallucination: a physical bookstore is growing. “How?” you might wonder. Well, the answer is by selling things that aren’t books.

Step into a Barnes & Noble and you will find that 40% of the store has been reallocated to other physical goods: vinyl records, DVDs, greeting cards, journals, pens, board games, CDs, and so on. What was once a bookstore is now a purveyor of material culture. Thirty years ago, you could find these products scattered across numerous retailers; today, physical media is housed in a handful of surviving chains or local heroes.

If you’d like to consume culture digitally, you can stay home and frequent a streaming service of your choosing. But if you’d like a tangible cultural experience, you can go to a Physical Culture Fun House like Barnes & Noble or an AMC movie theater. Similarly, the cineplex is becoming a catch-all for shared audiovisual experience. You can watch music videos together, consume content that honors your faith in a shared setting, watch a climactic episode of your favorite television show alongside like-minded fans, and participate in countless other experiences yet to be conceived.

The draw of these events won’t be the media itself. You could watch this content at the gym or on a plane if you so choose. Instead, the appeal will be the setting: a premium, physical environment where you consume that content surrounded by other people, with the “premium” coming from tangibility and a rejection of digital isolation.

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