Hicks No Longer Picks Movie Theater Tix

Letter to Ephesians: Movie houses are quickly going the way of the 8-track tape as older folks don’t want to pay $10 for cheap popcorn they can’t digest & youngsters are addicted to streaming. That Netflix/Paramount bidding war for Casablanca-owner Warner Bros is no coincidence.

That’s the gist of Jason Riley’s WSJ column, “It Will Soon Be Curtains for the Movie Theater.” He waxed: “Jerry Seinfeld, who presumably knows a thing or two about show business, has said the film industry as currently constituted is kaput, even if Tinseltown has been slow to understand what’s happened in recent decades. ‘They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over,’ he told GQ magazine last year. ‘Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives. When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, must trying to see.’”

The ticket sales don’t lie. They’ve been falling since the 1950s, Riley notes, and since the pandemic have been dropping precipitously. In 2019, ticket sales tallied $1.2 billion, but by last year, they were only $760 million and change. Seniors as well as parent being asked to pay $15 a head for woke movies in a mostly empty cavernous theater is certainly a factor. According to Riley, kids especially “seem mostly to enjoy staring at themselves on their [small screen] devices … [while] … streaming allows them to consume movies on their terms rather than the theaters’ and Netflix is giving them what they want.” Imagine Bogey’s Rick walk off in a fog with Capt. Renault and saying, ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of the end of a beautiful friendship.’”

Davd Soul