See You At The Movies: Cinemagoing in the Era of ‘Eventisation’

Are movies dead?

When I started this Substack a few months ago and needed to come up with a snappy title (previous highlights from my near two decades of intermittent blogging on the internet: ‘Kill the Giggler’ and ‘Looks Like I’m Walkin’’, two excellent cool guy references), I tossed around a few ideas but ultimately couldn’t help returning to the phrase that I had been hearing, or at least thinking, over and over again in the last 18 months. Movies are dead. Are movies dead? Hmm.

In many ways it’s hard to ignore the sepulchral funk that has hung around the industry for the past few years, one that’s lingered essentially since the release of Avengers: Endgame, the film that can now be identified as the undeniable highpoint of the Marvel industrial-complex. How naïve we were back then: how we oohed at America’s Ass, and how we ahhed at America’s Ass picking up the hammer when we know he doesn’t normally pick up the hammer. How we cried as we said goodbye to the Iron Man, before eagerly asking our Marvel overlords: ‘what’s next?’ And of course it transpired that nobody had really thought this through.

Then - and I don’t know if you guys are history buffs or not - a global pandemic came along to push people out of the cinematheques and back onto their sofas, where the rascal Tiger King and Michael Jordan were waiting for them, an enticing combination that meant that not even Christopher Nolan and Charisma’s John David Washington making the world’s most headache inducing film could tempt people back into their multiplex seats and away from the streaming teat.

With the mid-budget movie long dead due to the dominance of the ever-more-expensive blockbusters, the big budget, frictionless and flavourless nourishment that has long become the only fare in town steadily started to go on the turn as well: the superhero films got objectively worse, their already overstuffed narratives increasingly complicated and cannibalised by a punishing streaming TV schedule created by wide-eyed, jittery media executives intent on racking up ever more post credits scenes and legacy cameos. The special effects began to deteriorate too, resulting in our current CGI Multiverse of Mid-ness, an increasingly frenetic and weightless bilge that has been fatally hamstrung by an over-reliance on the same few visual effects companies, spectacularly overworked enterprises even pre-MCU that are at this point now effectively operating as the modern equivalent of Victorian workhouses - if Victorian workhouses were powered entirely by Monster Energy drinks and cracked copies of After Effects. At some point during all this someone made a Batgirl movie, as a joke.

And even the non-superhero Content started getting noticeably weaker too, partly due to Netflix sobering up and becoming the last people on earth to realise that greenlighting a $100m budget, special effects laden adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise to premiere on a streaming service was fucking insane, and subsequently rushed to turn off the auteur money tap (one Apple TV+ was only too happy to switch back on for Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese, at least temporarily).

But when assessing the dreck-laded landscape of streaming movies you can also point to the corrosive influence of 2019’s cinema saviours the Russo brothers, who have spent the last few years post-Endgame pissing out a stream of streaming content so terrifyingly expensive and mind-bogglingly ephemeral - The Gray Man, Cherry, Citadel - that it has started to give the sense of a carefully ordained if low-stakes psy-op on the masses, one calibrated specifically to prepare us for a smooth-brained AI-driven future of entertainment. The theory that this was the opening salvo in an industry wide arms race to reach the bottom of the banality barrel wasn’t helped when Dexter Fletcher - possibly the only man to have been directed by Derek Jarman, David Lynch and Guy Ritchie - gave an interview where he cheerfully admitted his Apple TV+ film Ghosted was effectively co-directed by an algorithm, an anecdote relayed with the becalmed nonchalance of an elderly relative telling you about the nice man from the bank who just called them to check that their pin number was still 4209.

Of course, something had to give, and now the entire industry is now understandably and justifiably on strike, and locked into what appears to be an inescapable death spiral: the only way the strike can be feasibly be resolved is by the studios and tech companies voluntarily revealing the suspiciously sandy-looking viewing figures that their streaming empires have been built on, so that creatives can now take a quantifiable share in the profits. This is something that will not only cost the studios money in real terms, but unless the viewing figures prove to be anything other than astonishingly good, it will also brutally and immediately tank their stock prices while lowering their cultural and social approval rating to a point somewhere between ‘Betamax’ and ‘Miramax’. The only hope for the actors and writers is that these companies have repeatedly demonstrated that they might actually be stupid enough to talk themselves into doing this.

But wait, what’s this? Is it a Barben? Is it a Heimer? No, it’s Barbenheimer! Not a moment too soon, two extremely good, original, authentically messy movies come along, from proper filmmakers, starring legitimate movie stars, that are not only commercially successful, but unprecedented successes, seemingly putting movies and moviegoing at the heart of contemporary culture for the first time since at least the Avengers double header - hell, you might even need to go as far back as something like Jurassic Park, in terms of pure cultural impact. Multiplexes across the world were deluged by a sea of pink cinemagoers, the foyers packed with excited people patiently queueing for a selfie in the life size Barbie box. One of the most staggering stats in an opening week full of them was US tracking data that stated 20% of the people who planned to see Barbie opening weekend either hadn’t been in a cinema since the pandemic, or couldn’t remember the last time they had gone to a cinema.

And Oppenheimer’s success has been equally as unusual and remarkable, not only packing out the UK’s biggest screen for a month with a three hour historical drama about theoretical physics, but also successfully introducing film stock and aspect ratio fetishism to normies as part of the deal - seeing Oppenheimer the right way, in 70mm IMAX as Nolan intended, became a commercially successful marketing angle, despite the esoteric nature of the format and the extreme scarcity of venues that could actually show it.

Interestingly, the moral of both Barbie and Oppenheimer appears to be basically that the only people who are cool and worth your time are feminists and communists respectively; so you might have thought to expect a major backlash from the right about this incipient Red and Pink Menace arriving to take over our screens. Lucky for us in the wokerati, then, that the nuttiest people in the world were at that moment temporarily distracted, as they also had a surprise smash catering directly to them playing in cinemas: Sound of Freedom, a fairly workmanlike crime thriller spiced up by a promotional campaign that has been soundtracked by a piercingly loud, SUV windshield-shattering Qanon dog-whistle. ¹ I’m old enough to remember when being anti-child sex-trafficking was a relatively uncomplicated position, and yet here in the 2023 movie landscape little is what it initially seems.

It’s cheerfully ironic, given its subject matter, that Sound of Freedom is ultimately straight out of the exploitation movie playbook, a branch on the same family tree as Reefer Madness, or The Killing of America, or Faces of Death, or Loose Change. It’s a movie that directly preys on contemporary fears in a luridly fascinating way while blurring the lines between reality, activism, and fiction, something it achieves with a combination of clever marketing and Barnumesque promotional showmanship and gimmickry.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s already famous end credits sequence, where Jim Caviezel directly addresses the audience to explain that the issues present in the film are extremely not made up, before solemnly asking the audience to scan an onscreen QR code, one that redirects to a page to book tickets to see the film for people who ‘might not be able to afford it’, before urging them to keep spreading the bad news. By all accounts this scheme has been a giant success, at the box office at least, where the film has cleared over $160m against a $14.5m budget (outgrossing the latest Mission: Impossible in the US) with a UK release still to come later this month. In terms of actually getting people out to see it, however, the picture is less clear - there have been some reports of ‘sold out’ screenings being revealed to only have had a handful of people in attendance, with dark mutterings of theatres being booked out by elements that perhaps have a vested interest in seeing a right-wing, Christian, Q-curious film do well.

But the money doesn’t lie. Maybe Sound of Freedom really is Trojan horse-ing a sinister right wing conspiracy to the masses, where everyone who sees it is going to be activated Manchurian Candidate style for Jan 6th Pt 2: This Time It’s Personal, but you have to admit the QR code stunt is also the kind of cheeky carny bullshit that William Castle would have fucking loved, and an encouraging sign that film producers still have some fun tricks up their sleeve to get people back in the theatres.

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So the movies and moviegoing would seem in pretty good health, then. As a lifelong collector of half-empty glasses, however, I can’t help but think that what these successes do show, is that the idea of ‘movie-going’ as a pastime in and of itself is probably dead, gone the same way as the concept of heading to a video store to pick up some videos based on what’s in stock and what artwork is on the box. People don’t go to the movies any more, they go to see a movie. The era of ‘eventisation’, as marketing teams have coined it, is here: your event movies have to be events.

Of course, the idea of going to the cinema to hang out, to enjoy the ritual of being there, and to watch something just because you want to be entertained for two hours was wounded, possible fatally, by the Covid pandemic. Increased ticket and concession prices had started to turn people away a while ago, but the pandemic let an idea form in the heads for potential cinemagoers that hasn’t gone away and is beginning to calcify: the stakes have to be high for you to leave your house. Wanting to be entertained, or challenged, or exhilarated, or moved, is no longer going to cut it for most people - they can get all of those things at home from their fathomless content libraries.

It feels as if we are reaching the point where people will only reliably head to the cinema if it feels personally or politically significant. What Barbie, Oppenheimer and Sound of Freedom all have in common is that going to see any of them felt like a statement; or at least that’s what the marketing campaigns have attempted to convince you. Are you a Barbie GF, supporting female filmmakers and big budget blockbusters not aimed at teenage boys? An Oppenheimer BF, supporting classic dramatic filmmaking shot on 70mm film and devoid of CGI? Or a Sound of Freedom WTF, intent shutting down the adrenochrome baby factories one cinema ticket at a time? All of the above? Did you do the Barbenheimer double bill, because you contain multitudes? The big recent hits have all subtly reframed the act of movie-going as activism - in some cases more literally than others - which I suppose is the next logical step forward from fan culture. ‘I identify as someone who cares about X’ - that X could be Marvel superheroes, or it could be child-trafficking. The point is, is it something that you consider part of your personal brand, and can be mined for your content of your own? Then that is something worth the trip. And if everyone else is doing it, then the nature of social media virality establishes the kind of momentum that creates these kind of epochal hits.

Last year saw a pleasantly ludicrous example of thus with the Gentleminions trend on TikTok, which saw thousands of US teenagers attend Minions: The Rise of Gnu in formalwear, in the process driving the film to the 5th biggest box office return of the year. And of course Barbenheimer was a legitimate phenomenon, both on social media and in the real world. These were event movies in the most literal sense, a triumph of eventisation.

But is this the sign of a healthy culture, and a sign of a healthy future for the industry? Where people only want to engage with one of our most enduring art forms if the film is question is part of a wider culture war statement, or if they have the promise of taking part in a glorified flash-mob? Is that future really any better for long time movie fans than the MCU hegemony?

You may be thinking that the idea that certain films will get people in the cinema and eventually evolve into wider pop culture events is hardly a new development. But the idea that only a small handful of films are worthy of being in the cinema at all is what has really changed over the past five years. Streaming’s convenience means it is the default viewing platform for the vast majority of people, and streamers seem to be dead set on devaluing the two hour movie in particular. The bespoke streaming movies of recent times (I’m referring to the ones that receive the bulk of the promotion and are clearly pushed as commercial projects, rather than the ‘prestige’ and international films acquired to compete during awards season) have been so uniformly abject and devoid of flavour that it is all but impossible for them to last in people’s memories for more than a couple of hours, let alone establish a foothold in wider popular culture - films like Ghosted and Greyhound and Bright and The Gray Man and Red Notice and Coming to America 2 and Heart of Stone are designed to evaporate into steam on impact, their aims no loftier than existing to prevent you from watching something else during their runtime. They enter and then leave your consciousness with the speed and brutality of an unsolicited dick pic.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the majority of people watch these films while flipping through Instagram Stories, or contributing to a Reddit thread on IBS, or masturbating to something in another browser tab: it’s hard to make an impression in that kind of arena. But the disposable, ephemeral nature is baked into at a cellular level, as Dexter Fletcher unwittingly let slip. They are a evolution of Roger Corman’s brutally functional exploitation formula - we need a helicopter chase at the 30 minute mark, and no less than four pairs of boobs - only one run by a parasitic AI algorithm, instead of a kindly old man who helped bring the films of Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman to a US audience for the first time. The strikes are weary about the impact of AI on creatives, but the damage is already apparent: the risible, data-driven efforts of the streamers are conditioning people to see movies as inherently disposable and interchangeable, mere tender in an attention economy where they are made to compete against Vanderpump Rules and Fortnite. So why would you ever pay money to leave your house and watch one?

Television, meanwhile doesn’t seem to be experience a similar existential crisis, because guess what: it’s in the streamers interests to invest in the broader culture of TV and its legitimacy as an art form, while they would quite happily see theatrical film distribution cease entirely. For movie culture (theatrical or otherwise) to sustain, the only real answer is a healthy, varied slate of films, from a variety of perspectives and voices, that are supported and promoted by an industry invested in keeping the medium relevant to as many people as possible. The Superhero Era (which now, barring a miracle, is winding down if not officially over) did a huge amount of damage to the idea of movies as a broad church, by placing an emphasis on one (admittedly hugely commercially successful) niche. As director James Gray eloquently noted in a SlashFilm interview last year:

"When you make movies that only make a ton of money and only one kind of movie, you begin to get a large segment of the population out of the habit of going to the movies. And then you begin to eliminate the importance of movies culturally. When you are so quarterly earnings bottom-line minded, you lose the big brain vision... The fact that [the slate is] no longer broad-based for theatrical by the studios, means that they have forced a smaller and smaller and smaller segment of the population to like it...

Maybe Ang Lee's The Ice Storm didn't make a billion dollars, but it maintained broad-based interest. So, we've got to force it back. The studios should be willing to lose money for a couple of years on art film divisions, and in the end they will be happier."

Given that studio executives have recently been cheerfully admitting they’re waiting for writers and actors to lose their houses rather than give them a marginal increase in rights and pay, the idea that they would also engage in this kind of long term thinking and short term pain is pretty fanciful.

So we are where we are, and the existential threat for the industry is far from gone. But there are sparks of light to be found here and there, if you love and care about movies. Reparatory cinema is booming - why not check out some local screenings in your area - in a development that may or may not be linked to the huge popularity of Letterboxd, which for all the sniping about Letterboxd bros and Bechdel test obsessed YA scolds, is still one of the most interesting and vibrant communities on the internet, one defined by a sincere lack of gatekeeping and genuine curiosity. Gen Z may not be going to ‘the movies’ any more, but a look at Letterboxd user numbers, or at the packed houses at rep screenings of The Virgin Suicides or Enter the Dragon or The Wicker Man shows that they’re as obsessed with the history of movie culture as any generation before it, if not more than ever. The question this raises then is whether ‘movies’ are to become a nostalgic emblem of the past, a piece of antiquated fetishism for elitists, like vinyl records, or attention spans.

At this point, anything is possible. Movies aren’t dead, but they will be if you let them. All we can do is keep watching and keep supporting great art, artists and the industry, whether that’s via vocal support of the strikes, or attending film festivals, or making a regular effort to visit your local multiplex every once in a while. Perhaps equally important, if not more so, is supporting not-so-great art and artists, the mediocre and the perfectly fine that make us the spine of the entire industry. It’s important to remember that seeing any movie in a cinema currently is a political statement, and movies-as-activism. If you want to do something meaningful today, go to the cinema and give a completely average movie your full attention, something that will have absolutely no impact on you personally or professionally whether you see it or not; a complete non-event. The future of the industry might just depend on it.

A special message from Movies Are Dead:

I want to thank you for taking the time to read the article ‘Are Movies Dead?’. I understand some of you may now be feeling sad, or overwhelmed. But living in fear isn’t how we solve this problem. It’s living in hope. It’s believing that we can make a difference…because we can.

I want to make one thing clear - this article isn’t about me, or the Gentleminions, or Dexter Fletcher. It’s about the movies.

That’s what I’m inviting you to pull out your phone and take a picture of this QR code, to pay it forward and buy tickets for a 3.15pm screening of Haunted Mansion for someone who may not be able to afford it. Join us and millions of others as we share our message that collectively, we are never going to give them up.

1. Sound of Freedom features Jim Caviezel playing real-life child trafficking activist Tim Ballard: both appeared on Jordan Peterson’s podcast last month, where Ballard claimed that he had encountered children’s blood and organs being harvested for adrenochrome in West Africa at a ‘baby factory’, a classic Qanon trope. Caviezel meanwhile claimed on a recent episode of Steve Bannon's podcast that there is a ‘whole adrenochrome empire’ driving demand for trafficked children, before claiming (falsely) that it is ‘10 times more potent than heroin’ and ‘has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.’