How much do you really miss going to the movies?

Pandemic has turned out to be an extinction-level event for movie-going

Will movie-going survive the pandemic? The question sounds both trivial — there are surely graver matters to worry about — and unduly apocalyptic. Movie theatres, after all, have reopened in many parts of the U.S. and some people went to see “Tenet” last month — but not as many as Warner Bros. had hoped for and few enough to start the fall film season under a pessimistic cloud.

Lately, the news has become only grimmer.

On Oct. 5, Regal Cinemas, the second-largest exhibition chain in the United States, announced it would temporarily shut down its more than 500 theatres. (In Canada, Cineplex was forced to close its theatres all over again in Toronto and other COVID-19 hot spots.)

Studios have pushed most of their high-profile 2020 holiday releases into 2021 — for now. And Disney let it be known that the new Pixar feature “Soul,” originally scheduled to open in theatres in June, would debut on the Disney Plus streaming platform in December, bypassing multiplexes altogether.

That news was a teaser of sorts for the corporate blockbuster that arrived last Monday: The announcement of a restructuring at Disney that would, in the words of the chief executive Bob Chapek, involve “managing content creation distinct from distribution.”

“Our creative teams,” Chapek’s statement explained, laying on the poetry, “will concentrate on what they do best — making world-class, franchisebased entertainment — while our newly centralized global distribution team will focus on delivering and monetizing that content in the most optimal way across all platforms.”

Those words don’t exactly pronounce a death sentence for theatres, but they do express a bottom-line indifference about their future.

Netflix, which is sprinkling some of its 2020 releases into theatres, has built a subscription empire on the belief that people would just as soon stay home and surrender to the algorithm.

What if the pandemic turns out to be an extinction-level event for movie-going?

Perhaps no art form has remade itself as frequently and dramatically in so short a life span as film. Over the past 100some years, “going to the movies” has encompassed a lot of different ways of leaving the house and a corresponding variety of destinations: curtainedoff carnival booths, grand palaces with gilded ceilings and velvet seats, Bijoux and Roxys on small-town main streets, suburban drive-ins and shopping mall multi-screens, grindhouses, art-houses, repertory houses and porno parlours.

So which one are we mourning? What are we defending? A frequent answer, offered both by those who worry that movies will die and by those who insist that they can’t, is community, the pleasure of sitting in the dark among friends and strangers and partaking of a collective dream.

Did you buy your ticket online?

Did you wait in line only to find out that what you wanted to see was sold out?

Was the person in the seat in front of you texting through the sad parts, while the person behind you kicked the back of your seat?

Was the theatre full of crying babies? Talkative senior citizens? Unruly teenagers?

Or — what may be worse — did you find yourself, on a weeknight a few weeks into the run of a well-reviewed almost-hit, all but alone in the dark?

The problem, to return to Chapek’s memo, was “worldclass, franchise-based entertainment” — not every instance of it, but the models of creation and consumption the idea imposed. The big theatre chains were kept alive by Disney, which dominated the domestic box office by ever greater margins and which seemed almost uniquely able to produce the kind of big-event movies that could attract the masses on opening weekend.

Those films, parcelled out every other month or so, at once raised financial expectations among the exhibitors and helped break the habit of regular movie attendance among audiences.

There was less and less room — literally fewer rooms but also less collective bandwidth — for non-franchise entertainment.

At least at the multiplexes.

The movie audience didn’t vanish; it splintered. Some stayed home, now that genuine cinema — not prestige TV, but restored classics and new work by established auteurs — could be found on streaming.

The shuttering of theatres has accelerated this tendency, at least for the moment. In the absence of blockbusters, small, audacious movies have popped up like mushrooms on a forest floor. Will the return of independent theatres, however many remain, help those little movies survive? Will a return to normalcy herald the next stage in an emerging duopoly, with the two dominant companies — Netflix and Disney — using big screens to showcase selected content?

But maybe that’s putting it the wrong way. Making predictions, in addition to being foolish, is an expression of passivity, an acceptance of our diminished role as consumers of culture.

Instead of wondering what might happen, what if we thought about what we want and thought of ourselves not as fans or subscribers but as partners and participants?

I’ll see you at the movies.