No laptop, tablet or TV screen can replace cinema’s collective thrill
When the first Disney Mulan film came out in 1998, I was ten. My friend Alice and I were taken to see it on the big screen at the 02 Centre on London’s Finchley Road.
In the avalanche scene, we clung to each other in terror that Mulan’s lucky cricket wasn’t going to make it, and in the car on the way home we sang what lyrics we could remember of the cross-dressing military anthem, I’ll Make a Man Out of You. Apparently, studio bosses hadn’t wanted Cri-kee the cricket in the film and kept looking for excuses to cut him from the story. Which just goes to show that movie executives, then as now, are more than capable of wilfully, woefully misjudging their audience.
Disney has this week announced the decision not to release the live-action remake of Mulan in cinemas. Today’s ten-yearold girls will be able to rent the new Mulan from the streaming service Disney+ for a fee of $29.99 (£22.80) on top of an annual subscription of £59.99.
Not exorbitant when you consider the cost of taking a daughter and her best friend (and their mutinous younger brothers) to the cinema and letting them loose on the pick’n’mix. But whatever saving a family might make on the popcorn, they will have lost something far greater by staying in and watching it at home.
Over lockdown, as my husband and I sat down to Friday date-nights in front of National Theatre Live, I tried to put my finger on what made five-star productions of Frankenstein, One Man, Two Guvnors and Antony and Cleopatra so flimsy and unsatisfactory.
In the past, when we’d missed tickets to Ruth Wilson’s Hedda Gabler or Gemma Arterton’s Saint Joan, we had bought tickets to Curzon cinema broadcasts and been riveted by theatre seen live, though at a remove. But what thrilled in a sold-out Screen 1 felt flat on a laptop.
Scale was part of it, but fellowship was what was really missing. Hell may be other people’s buckets of salted snacks, but without an audience to jump at the poltergeist, weep at the ending and gasp at the Knives Out reveal, every emotional dial is turned down.
A confession: at the end of last year I went with a girlfriend (we are both in our 30s) to see Frozen 2 in Leicester Square. On a damp December evening there was something unexpectedly uplifting about sharing with strangers the snowbound power ballads, the triumphs of sisterhood and the adventures of Sven the comedy moose.
On a tablet, on a smartphone, even on a plasma flat-screen at home, the experience would have been the less for not being all together in the Odeon gloaming.
There’s something, too, about the uninterrupted run of a film. At home, it’s stop, start, pause, play, “I’m just popping to the loo” and “put the kettle on, love”. Tricky to be truly immersed when you’re watching Parasite over the ironing.
We cannot live the rest of our lives in lockdown. There was a special sort of ceremony and drum-roll expectation about going to the cinema as children. It would be a terrible shame if that sense of occasion was lost.
In truth, I can’t remember a single scene from Pocahontas, which I saw when I was eight, but I do remember the treat of the outing and that my godmother took us to an American-style diner afterwards and let us have milkshakes for supper.