Having worked in art-house cinema for a while I beg to differ. Not only big action movies work in cinemas. Also art-house and specially quiet or slow movies tend to have a better effect and deeper experience in cinema. Often because of the fact that you can not pause and go to the loo or check your phone or get some other way distracted.
This does work better in art-house cinemas with quiet and invested audience. And people are different, audiences are different and peoples home watching experiences are different. But I can see clearly how the longer I work in cinema the more I prefer watching a movie in big screen instead at home. Even if I just watch it alone in big auditorium. Both for the ritual of taking the time out from other activities and completely focusing on the movie and enjoyment that good camerawork, acting, set-design and sound come better our on the big screen.
Obviously every viewing experience is different. In the end movie watching is experience between the viewer, film and co-audience. I have had many unforgettable evenings with very run down equipment or small screens. But I do feel that in our more and more distracted times cinemas carry a good function to present a film in distraction free setting, with good quality and mood supporting environment.
In addition to the technical quality I have learned to enjoy more and more how much enjoyment it is if someone knowable has made a choices and put together a film program. Like any good curator it brings out options I would never know to look for myself or would not really investigate because of my biases. Sadly it is finically more easy to sustain this kind of program in film festivals not in everyday cinemas.
Clearly I'm not saying that cinema is dead - or that no-one is going to the cinema. I'm saying that small art films appears to small audiences, and so finding the number of willing watchers in a given location, which add enough loot into the system to keep both the cinema open, and also the film-makers in the black is getting hard.
Tickets are expensive enough to keep me at home, and while watching in a cinema can be fun there are also times it's less so. Some theaters have better seats, others are worse and so on. Ultimately distributing movies via cinema's adds a very high cost to me seeing it. And in 99% of cases I consider that cost untenable.
So, I'm not saying the cinema approach is bad, just that outside of some very narrow places there just isn't the demand enough to keep a cinema open, much less make any kind of dent in the profitability of the movie itself.
I guess like with many job. You can put a little heart into it and care about the customers. This is something that is hard to replicate in scale for big cleaning company.
Not many cleaning companies do that. And those who do are loved deeply by their customers.
This does work better in art-house cinemas with quiet and invested audience. And people are different, audiences are different and peoples home watching experiences are different. But I can see clearly how the longer I work in cinema the more I prefer watching a movie in big screen instead at home. Even if I just watch it alone in big auditorium. Both for the ritual of taking the time out from other activities and completely focusing on the movie and enjoyment that good camerawork, acting, set-design and sound come better our on the big screen.
Obviously every viewing experience is different. In the end movie watching is experience between the viewer, film and co-audience. I have had many unforgettable evenings with very run down equipment or small screens. But I do feel that in our more and more distracted times cinemas carry a good function to present a film in distraction free setting, with good quality and mood supporting environment.
In addition to the technical quality I have learned to enjoy more and more how much enjoyment it is if someone knowable has made a choices and put together a film program. Like any good curator it brings out options I would never know to look for myself or would not really investigate because of my biases. Sadly it is finically more easy to sustain this kind of program in film festivals not in everyday cinemas.