Questioning the Future
“Movie Theaters Aren’t Dying — They’re Being Murdered” screamed the headline of an article from The Nation online in December 2020. Apart from being an attention-grabbing title, it forces readers to ask: are movie theaters actually going obsolete?
Threats and competition to movie theaters have been around almost since the beginning of movie theaters themselves. With each new era of technology, there has been a contender in media consumption that caused consternation in the film-going world: “This time, movie theaters are goners!”
Very clearly, this has not happened, and movie theaters are still around. Let’s take a brief look at some of the competition faced by the movie theater industry through the years:
A Downward Slope
Over the past 25 years, movie theaters have witnessed a decline in numbers. As more film viewing options became available, the costs of keeping a movie theater running outweighed the profits, resulting in movie theater closures.
The following graph uses data from the National Association of Theater Owners, which displays the sharply declining numbers from 1995 to 2005, and visualizes the gradual leveling-out in the numbers from 2005 to 2020.
Although this graph is admittedly proof of some movie theaters failing, it does not tell the entire story. Firstly, over the past ten years, the numbers have remained relatively steady, which could indicate a leveling-out. This means that theaters are still holding their own – even in the greatest era of streaming yet – which indicates that patrons are still supporting movie theaters after all.
The Impact of COVID-19
The following graph from Google Trends displays the number of Google searches for the term “movie theaters near me” from the year 2018 to 2021. If you use your cursor to explore the graph, you’ll see the lowest point on the graph comes from April of 2020, the exact time when the COVID-19 pandemic initially influenced the world.
This also led me to a separate search query that popped up for the first time during the pandemic. “Are any movie theaters open near me” witnessed spikes in activity, showing that people were anxious to see if any theaters were open at all.
Our case study, the Majestic Theater was also affected by COVID-19:
When Broadway went dark in mid-March [2020], performing arts centers across the country, including the Majestic, quickly followed. In the immediate aftermath our daily cinemas closed, and staff rescheduled or cancelled live performances for the remainder of the 2019-2020 season. Eventually the 2020 Summer Classic Movies series and the 2020-21 season – for which planning was well underway – were also wiped from the calendar.
Jeffrey Gabel, executive director of the Majestic Theater
(Gettysburg Times “Progress 2021: Gettysburg College’s Majestic Theater”)
While movie theaters did take a huge hit during the pandemic, perhaps more reassuring is the upward trend shown on the graph for the spring and summer of 2021. Film lovers are excited and ready to get back to the movie theater!
