By For the better part of the last decade, it has felt as if the theatrical experience has been standing on its last leg, waging its final war, poised to fend off a changing tide or be swept away by it. Between the rise and proliferation of streaming services and the COVID-19 pandemic – which shuttered movie theaters and disrupted the habit of gathering in close quarters, and the then lingering hesitation around sitting elbow-to-elbow with strangers – the decline has felt both cultural and psychological. Add to that a wave of consolidation and monopolization across the entertainment industry, and it has increasingly seemed as though the burden of keeping theaters alive has fallen solely on moviegoers, critics, bloggers, and the faithful who treat the theater as a kind of church of entertainment.
So it is both refreshing and necessary to hear Ryan Gosling push back on that idea in the wake of Project Hail Mary‘s triumphant international box office success, arguing that the responsibility does not lie with ticket buyers, but with filmmakers and talent themselves. As Gosling put it, “Here we are, we are all back in theaters. It is not your job to keep them open. It is our job to make things that make it worth your while to come out.”
As more and more of a film’s box office prospects rest on its ability to justify premium formats, the movies finding success are the ones engineered for that scale. IMAX, Dolby, and even VistaVision – which has seen a quiet resurgence with The Brutalist, One Battle After Another, and Bugonia all playing in the format – have become not just exhibition options but commercial imperatives. If Project Hail Mary is any indication, with premium large format screens accounting for 56 percent of its opening weekend revenue, audiences are not just paying for the movie. They are paying for the format.
And that makes sense. At home, you can buy a high-end television for under a thousand dollars, stream in 4K, and approximate a pretty respectable cinematic experience. What you cannot replicate is scale, immersion, or the particular energy of a packed premium screening. So when tickets creep toward twenty dollars, the question becomes unavoidable: why leave the house at all?
That is where the theatrical model has quietly undermined itself. The window of exclusivity continues to shrink. Warner Bros. Discovery, now finalizing a merger with Paramount Pictures and Skydance Media after a failed flirtation with Netflix, is still publicly committed to the 45-day theatrical window – a theater-first model on paper, though one that increasingly functions as a countdown clock to streaming. That compression makes the stakes clear: if a film is going to land where you can watch on your own couch in just six weeks, it has to justify leaving yours on day one.
What Gosling is really getting at, perhaps more bluntly than the industry is comfortable admitting, is that as the economics shift, so must the product. As the costs for leaving the house skyrocket, it is on filmmakers to give audiences something they cannot get at home. Increasingly, that means designing for spectacle, for immersion, for scale, for the premium experience. Are movies like this traditionally amongst my favorites? No. But they remain necessary for the industry as a whole to survive.
Like many throughout the wider film world, I have taken in the news of a merger between Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures with a fair amount of dread, though the alternative of deeper alignment with Netflix might have accelerated the shift away from theatrical exclusivity even faster. Because the theater remains one of the last places where distraction can be stripped away. No second screen, no fractured attention, no being-at-home noise or the dog begging to be let out. When a film truly works, that one-on-one communion with it in its intended format can feel almost religious.
And I do not think that goes away. So long as the recipe for continued success is in place. New audiences will keep discovering that feeling. So long as the theatrical experience continues to exist, younger viewers will still walk into theaters and be converted. Baptized in the majesty of – cue the Scorsese meme – CINEMA.
But what the industry needs to recognize, especially when it comes to aspiring blockbusters, is that a big screen and a shabby projector are no longer enough. If theatrical is going to survive, it has to evolve toward what audiences are actually demanding: a premium, intentional, elevated experience.
For the past decade, people have been writing the theater’s obituary. But maybe the industry’s own Project Hail Mary – its last-ditch attempt to save itself – is not all that mysterious. The path is already visible: build for scale, design for immersion, and give people something the living room cannot touch. Maybe serve them up some themed drinks and tasty food. It does not make the task of saving the theater any easier, but the outline is there.
Audiences have been pretty clear about what gets them out of the house, and it is not convenience. It is scale, immersion, and the kind of spectacle that simply does not translate to the living room. The films that lean into that largess, that understand the room matters as much as the film itself, are the ones still drawing people in. Not out of loyalty or habit, but because they offer something that cannot be replicated anywhere else.
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