I hear, dimly and from a distance, that my fellow habitual moviegoers are annoyed with one another. Reddit users angry about their overstuffed, overloud theatrical experiences swap stories of other guests illegally filming the screen for the ’gram, propping up laptops and participating in Zooms, bringing toddlers into R-rated movies and letting them watch their iPads without headphones, and yelling and screaming and throwing things. People are disgusting! Wouldn’t it be better, one person wrote, to be at home, where you can pause Killers of the Flower Moon to pee and get dinner, rather than in a theater, “sitting in a chair some idiot was farting in for three hours”? I’ll let one more Bluesky user sum it up: “For me, at a theatre, Hell is other people.”
To which I say: I frickin’ wish! Far from the crowded urban cineplexes at the center of this increasingly common kind of moviegoing experience, I have the opposite problem, and I can’t say it’s much better. I live in a small city, in a rural county, in Ohio. I go to the movies a lot, often by myself. I’m often alone, or nearly alone, in the screening. Around this time last year, I really looked forward to seeing Gladiator II on its opening weekend. This movie looked like it would be for me: historical-ish, lots of swashbuckle-y ultraviolence, Paul Mescal. But when the day came, I was solo in the theater on a Thursday night. During the final fight, when—spoiler alert!—Mescal’s character Lucius rises from the riverbed where Denzel Washington’s Macrinus has him pinned and cuts off his mentor’s hand, I would have paid the theater extra to plant a couple loud teenagers nearby to call out “Damn!!!!” at the bloody, spurting stump. My past few years of filmgoing are filled with examples of movies that would have been really so much better with an audience that I, instead, saw in utter solitude. When Elisasue shambles out onto the stage in the bonkers closing act of The Substance, or when the sheriff in Eddington gatecrashes the fundraiser for the mayor and the sound system is blasting Katy Perry’s “Firework,” it’s just not nearly as much fun to go, “Oh my god … they didn’t!” when there’s no one else to do it with you.
I think of it as the lonely theater doom loop, a snake that eats its own tail as we hurtle toward a future where theatrical releases and moviemaking are both in big trouble.
Some part of this might be my own problem. I guess I could move back to a big city, but damn it, I like it here. I could invite my friends along more often; our Challengers screening was typically sparse last year, but we more than made up for it in our row of five hootin’-and-hollerin’ moms out for a good time. But the emptiness of many screenings is not only an annoyance for me. It’s an issue, both for theaters trying to keep moviegoing alive and for my fellow cinephiles. Matthew Frank, an associate editor at the Ankler who wrote about this phenomenon after he took a movie roadtrip across America, described the “empty theater problem” to me thus: “It just becomes this cycle where nobody shows up, and for the people who do come in, it sucks even more, and it just continues on that way.” I’ve started to think of it as the lonely theater doom loop, a snake that eats its own tail as we hurtle toward a future where theatrical releases and moviemaking are both in big trouble.
There are some other usual suspects to blame for moviegoers’ failure to return to a pre-COVID level of patronage: According to a recent Bain report, fewer wide releases, cheaper content alternatives everywhere, and ticket and concession prices are putting the hurt on. Frank also pointed out that, because movies come to streaming quickly (and are likely to come quicker still, if the new owner of Warner Bros. has its way), there’s less “aura” to seeing a movie early.
What can be done to get butts back in slightly stained faux-velvet seats? The Bain report recommended, among other things, that theaters trying to entice drifting audiences provide a sense of community and shared experience. Supposedly, in our age of loneliness (Reddit complainers aside), we do want to be around one another. Gen Z tells people conducting marketing surveys that they desire more in-person experiences, and they’ll for sure spend big bucks on concerts and live podcast tapings—facts that theater owners could be forgiven for looking upon hopefully. And when there are big movies out from franchises like Zootopia and Five Nights at Freddy’s, the audiences will still show up—more proof, possibly, that people do want to watch a movie together, even if some of those people are spilling their popcorn and openly vaping.
People still come out for big movies in my area—when we saw Wicked: For Good the Friday after Thanksgiving, there was a line (a little one, but still). Wicked: For Good was not a good movie, but when a hundred people laughed out loud simultaneously at Glinda lovingly mocking Elphaba’s cackle, it felt good, just for a second. But I fear a gap is going to develop, between the big, often not-great movies where there’s a crowd, and the other, less buzzy ones, where the lack of people at the screening accelerates everyone’s disinclination to take a chance on the next one.
At my two local spots, both independents, the problem is not even money. I can go to the movies for between $5 and $7, even on a weekend night. (I know; I’m sorry.) I hear rumors on my favorite coastal-elite film podcasts that a typical movie night could run a Los Angeles couple $200, after you tally up the cost of a babysitter, tickets, popcorn, cocktails. (Whether or not dinner should count as part of this hypothetical night’s total cost is a perpetual hot topic on moviegoer Reddit.) Thankfully, this kind of price tag is unheard of where I am, even at the Cinemark and Regal locations 45 minutes away; the chains seem to have a basic understanding of what the audiences at each locale will bear. The issue of cost (gas money aside) is functionally a nonfactor, especially when I go alone and pass up the popcorn.
There are certainly advantages to being alone, or nearly alone, in the theater. I can eat my smuggled-in quesadilla in peace. I can even bring in supplemental carrot sticks and crunch them up with gusto. (If you’re reading this, local theater owner, please don’t be mad! I do buy your Twizzlers.) I can put my feet up on the seat in front of me without a care in the world. I can leave my phone in a cup holder so that I can still see my notifications. (I know, I know, but what if somebody needs me?) Sometimes, after the lights go up, I catch the eye of the only other person in the place and start up a conversation. This happened after a showing of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, early this year. (My sole fellow moviegoer didn’t understand the end, either.) And when I saw the harrowing If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You alongside a single other pair of moviegoers recently, we all commiserated, while filing out, about that tube scene.
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But these consolations are slight. Most times, if there is anyone else in attendance, we leave the theater silently, with the slightly shamed affect of people who’ve made the mistake of coming to a poorly attended house party. And, despite my having it within reach, I don’t want to look at my phone during the movies. To me, the fear of my fellow audience members catching me doing that is a feature, not a bug, of the theatrical experience, forcing my attention forward, to a single screen. Even if the ticket is cheap as dirt, I don’t want the theater to be just like my living room, only bigger and with a better sound system. I want all of my regard to be, for just a couple of hours, harnessed to the regard of others, all pointed toward something great. Bain is right—this is part of what I’m paying for.
Every so often, I have a too-rare experience that reminds me what I’m missing all the other times I go to my lonely theater. At a fundraiser for abortion access a couple years ago, I watched Dirty Dancing in a packed room of people who were absolutely focused, with eyes-on-the-prize intensity, on the movie. We booed together at waiter Robbie’s smarm, laughed sympathetically at Baby’s awkwardness (“I carried a watermelon?”), and swooned at everything Johnny did. Up there was lithe, godlike Patrick Swayze, 20 feet tall on the big screen, dancing his heart out, at his absolute peak. All around me—for once, and thank God—was a sea of regular, mortal human faces, transported by something wonderful. This is what it’s all for. When will I get it next?
