are theatres dead?

 from article written in may 2022

Conventional wisdom tells us box office hauls have been down because of the pandemic, and we should give it time. But Spider-Man: No Way Home shattered that perception, at least a bit. It broke records in its opening weekend as fears of the Omicron variant peaked. More titles like The Batman and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have followed suit. Even an indie film like Everything Everywhere All at Once has proved mighty at the box office.

Box office numbers have been bleak since early 2020, when the world changed. But there’s been talk of streaming replacing movie theaters since long before that.
Big-name auteurs like Alfonso Cuarón and Martin Scorsese had already made the jump to streaming before the pandemic, with their films Roma and The Irishman released as Netflix originals in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Those years also saw the release of massive blockbusters in theaters though. Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame both broke box office records in theaters. Endgame remains the highest-grossing film of all time, in fact.

At the moment, a majority of Americans say they prefer to watch new releases at home, even when in-person theater screenings are available. That’s according to a survey by CivicScience from October 2021.

Streaming subscriptions in the US went up by 50% in 2020
Spider-Man: No Way Home took home $260 million in its opening weekend. It was also the first film to hit $1 billion since 2019.

Mid to low-budget films have been getting less and less space on screens over the years. They can’t compete with the likes of the MCU at least in part because they’re occupying fewer, less appealing time slots.

Some other movies have performed well at the box office, like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which earned over $100 million domestically, even while it was available to stream on HBO Max as soon as it hit theaters. But Dune, like Spider-Man: No Way Home, is a big movie, based on familiar source material, aimed at a huge cross-section of viewers.

At this rate, we’re moving towards an increasingly hybrid model. Movie theaters vs streaming services boils down less to who will win the whole pie than how the two branches of the industry will split it up.

“I think movies in theaters are going to become more expensive, event-ized,” actor and director Ben Affleck told Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. 
“You’re going to end up with fewer theaters, bigger theaters with a lot of nice things,” said Lucas. “Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks, like what Broadway costs today, or a football game. It’ll be an expensive thing … (The movies) will sit in the theaters for a year, like a Broadway show does. That will be called the ‘movie’ business.”

Big expensive movies work on the big screen. Little else does. Rising ticket prices and formats like IMAX 3D, 4DX, and D-Box have ushered in the “event-ization” of the movies too.