How Hollywood can try to keep audiences
“The Post,” a Fox production that epitomizes the kind of smart, entertaining film that is even more in danger of being consigned to television or such streaming giants as Netflix and Amazon, with Hollywood focusing all its energy and resources on cartoons and comic book adaptations.
During the “Post” panel, Spielberg expressed anxieties about the changes roiling an industry that experienced nearly a 5 percent decline in attendance this year. “I like that there's all these places, all these homes that are willing to accept good storytellers,” he said of the rapidly multiplying platforms. “But how will the movie theaters react when everybody decides to go to the movies at someone else's living room, as opposed to out into the world, into a theater?”
Theaters are already reacting by adding recliner seats and high-end concessions. And audiences have already proved that they crave the collective experience of seeing a film on the big screen, whether it's to scream together at “Get Out” and “It,” laugh together at “Girls Trip” or gasp in amazement at a magnificent visual spectacle like “Dunkirk.”
But another unspoken truth about moviegoing was self-evident during a recent trip back to my home town of Des Moines, where on Christmas Day, my family and I ran into a former colleague of my father's at a packed screening of “Darkest Hour.” As he took his seat in front of us, our friend joked, “(My wife) bought the tickets, so she gets to decide where we sit.”
I immediately recalled something that Amy Pascal — who produced “The Post” as well as “Molly's Game” — told me: Despite the movie industry being run by middle-aged men, that cohort is the hardest to get into theaters. It's the wives, mothers, girlfriends and, in my case, bossy adult daughters of a household who more often than not decide whether to stay home and watch “The Crown” or venture forth to the multiplex.
From rethinking corporate leadership and business practices to reframing what ends up on the screen, Hollywood's most radical realignment would be to finally figure out what women want, and why its survival depends on the answer.