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Are Cinemas_Theaters still Alive in your Area?

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AndyC_772:
I enjoy the cinema; weirdly, it was one of the things I found I really missed during the Covid lockdown. I found myself craving getting out of the house, and just having something new to watch... a way to escape a thoroughly crappy real world into a fantasy one, just for a few hours.

It's obvious the industry is still recovering from a couple of years' worth of dramatically reduced productivity, of course, but that's getting better now. This week my local cinema is currently showing a new Mission Impossible, a Spider-Man, an Indiana Jones and a Transformers, plus a handful of other movies that aren't 'big' popcorn munching franchises.

Ironically even though I do have a true 4K projector and a Dolby Atmos system, I don't go to the cinema any less often since installing those. I just enjoy a better experience when I watch movies at home than I would otherwise.

The things that have put me off the cinema from time to time have nothing to do with the likes of Netflix, or the difference in picture and sound presentation between home and theatre. Instead it's the little things...

- the fact that, every single time, I ask for a medium popcorn and have to go through the "it's only 50p more..." upsell. I hate this, and I'm sure the staff do too.

- the quality of popcorn has gone down, but of course, the prices haven't. In fact the ticket price at my local theatre is still very good indeed despite recent increases, but I'd rather pay another £1 and enjoy a better overall experience.

- during a number of screenings we've had to put up with a deliberately intrusive "screen checker"... someone wearing a hi-viz jacket wandering into the theatre and very obviously pointing a camera at the audience, presumably to try and spot recording devices. This happened 3 times during one particular showing, and I didn't go back for 6 months after that. I'm paying good money for a few hours' worth of immersion, it's not OK to break that, and don't dare try to use the 'c' word to justify yourself if the movie is already on file sharing sites.

Bryn:
Plenty of cinemas around here in Glasgow including the little Grosvenor Picture Theatre in its West End are still alive and kicking, despite a global pandemic and bootleg DVDs floating about.

But what am I saying... I've not been to the cinema in over a decade and I don't give a toss about what so-called "blockbusters" come out these days.

Zero999:
There are a couple of cinemas in my town with a population of about 186k.

I've never been much of a film person. I used to go with friends every now and then, or watch a DVD, again with friends or family, but never go alone. The new films do appear to be trying to make progressive political points, rather than just telling a good story. I accept there's always been some element of bias i.e. Russia bad, but that was because the west was at war with them. Nowadays they appear to be trying to change society, to suit their views.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: RoGeorge on July 19, 2023, 06:13:10 am ---Recent movies are unwatchable.  They became tools of ideological subversion.

Each movie these days, no matter the subject, will insert an interracial family, or bringing nazi out of the blue, or picturing men as weak, or as total jerks, or women with unfeminine behavior, or white bad, or adding LGBTQ+ characters, and so on.  Usually a combination of more than one of these.

Movies have become nothing more than 90 minutes of brainwashing disguised as a story.

--- End quote ---

Yeah, you don't need to go to a movie theater to see that though (which was the topic), the worst compilation of all this is on Netflix, with many more movies than are actually projected in theaters.
So people who never go to theaters anymore but watch all of their movies at home on platforms such as Netflix are even worse off.

This is nothing new though. Sure the ideology has shifted in recent years, but apart from "art cinema", mainstream movies have always more or less been vectors of ideology, in particular Hollywood movies.

VK3DRB:
Apparently movie piracy has declined significantly over the past few years. Maybe Netflix and others have something to do with it. The big hard disk sellers won't be happy.

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