Virtual cinema parties a way to get together while staying apart

There are 44 people in the Social Distance Movie Club’s Slack channel, where co-workers at Crooked Media have had discussions about everything from a Dwayne Johnson earthquake film to Faye Dunaway’s turn as Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest.”

It doesn’t have anything to do with the work that’s done at the Los Angeles company, which produces podcasts like Pod Save America (it’s also helped raise over $1 million for coronavirus relief ). But for the past few weeks of working from home, it’s become a way for the staff to pause the news and escape into the world of film together.

With theatres closed and most of the country staying home, virtual viewing parties are surging in popularity. They simulate the experience of going out to the movies, and you don’t even have to pass the popcorn.

Michael Martinez, Crooked Media’s executive producer for news and politics, got the Social Distance Movie Club going with The Rock in

“San Andreas.” Since then, they’ve viewed “National Treasure” and “Road House.”

“It started as a funny thing to do,” Martinez said. “But it’s preserved part of the experience of being at the office when you talk to someone in the kitchen about, say, the Keanu Reeves movie you watched the weekend before.”

It’s not just friends and co-workers, either. Movie studios, actors and even some publications are bringing people together online around the shared viewing of a film through Twitter hashtags, long a staple of appointment television.

MGM Studios two weeks ago held a “Legally Blonde” watch party, streaming the beloved Reese Witherspoon comedy for free on Facebook on a Friday morning.

And people turned out, with as many as 1.1 million tuning in over the course of the film, with a peak of 22,300 simultaneous views.

Availability of movies online can be an issue. It’s one thing for a group of people to agree on a film. It’s another find one that’s also streaming on a site where everyone is signed up with an account.

That’s a problem that film writer Tomris Laffly encountered with her group of friends. Instead of Slack, they watch together through the application “Netflix Party,” a Google Chrome extension that lets multiple computers stream the same film simultaneously with a chat window on the side of the screen. The only catch is that it has to be on Netflix for it to work.

Others have used chat applications such as Discord or Zoom.