Editor’s letter

Everybody has a memory of going to the movies—or many of them. For me, it’s my first “grown-up” movie, Buck Rogers; it’s the balcony in my local two-screen house as a teenager; it’s lining up with my parents for the latest release by the pre-scandal Woody Allen, a New York City ritual; it’s the art house cinema in college. Movies have been a central communal experience as far back as the 1930s. Television obviously grew to take up much more of our time, but first-run movies were still a night out. Then came the prestige features from Netflix and Amazon, and now, we have the deluge, as Warner Bros. brings its full slate of 2021 movies— Wonder Woman 1984, Dune, The Matrix 4— to HBO Max (see Film). There are directors up in arms, and there will be contracts to renegotiate. But to even the most casual movie viewer, this feels like a big breaking point. It’s not the day that the movies died, thank God, but it’s the day that moviegoing died.

Let’s not get too nostalgic about this experience. Hollywood already feasts generously on nostalgia. Just see the names of those Warner movies, or Netflix’s Mank, a black-and-white remembrance of the Orson Welles era. Big-budget movies mine the industry’s past, prestige films eulogize it. They’ve done that since forever, it’s true; Sunset Boulevard’s “It’s the pictures that got small” is one of the most quoted lines in film history. Humans want company, and there will be new rituals to replace going to the movie theater. But there is something about the movies that is hard to replace. Though there are great films being made today, and undoubtedly far more great television, we have come to take it all for granted. It is all “media,” slipping through our vision in a way that makes it all blend together and leaves the imprints jumbled as we move from the big screen to the television screen to the phone screen—the pictures getting smaller and less memorable with each step.

Managing editor