It depends. Can you afford to? Is there time? Are you tired?
At the same time, movies are almost always better on the big screen. Even the best home theaters can’t replicate the shared experience of a movie theater.
But reality is shifting the equation. As Seth Godin points out:
“The Long Tail plus always-on streaming can’t help but transform the culture. Muhammad Ali was the last “most famous person in the world” and that record probably won’t be broken.”
Because we are never all watching the same things again.
Some record books are untouchable. Cy Young has 511 wins. That’s nearly 100 more than the 2nd most. And modern greats like Maddox and Clemens topped out at 355 and 354 respectively. Today’s best pitchers will top out at 200 wins.
Because the game has changed.
Movie viewing has changed. We’re not all watching the same things. We’re not even all watching movies.
That doom and gloom about the Memorial Day weekend’s poor showing? There are reasons for it. The two most convincing being
- Nobody in the industry thought Furiosa was a tentpole movie.
- Last year’s strike reduced the stock of movies for this year.
But it isn’t as if the industry isn’t under massive change. Our attempts to measure and evaluate based on ticket sales is like comparing today’s pitchers to Cy Young. It makes no sense at all.
The Marvels was treated as a box office disappointment, but everything is a box office disappointment now. When it became a streaming favorite the moment it was released, did we change our assessment of it?
Habits are changing.
And the old measurements don’t work. Because we aren’t merely measuring different things, we’re measuring in completely different environments.
Baseball doesn’t just have a Cy Young wins problem. It has an “all of the records” problem. And one way they account for this is by also measuring today’s performances against each other rather than a previous era.
There are several different ways to do this, but the most famous is Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which attempts to compare a player’s impact to the team at their position against others at the same position.
We’ve gotten used to Box Office numbers that have no objective relationship to anything.
Experts know which movies are going to be the best long before we do. And they schedule them on particular dates. And then other studios pick different dates for their wide assortment of releases.
But since 2020, everything has changed. Fewer theatrical releases, first from the pandemic, then the strike. More streaming options. Rising theater prices and more spending on home viewing.
Fewer movies overall means fewer tentpoles to schedule. Which also means the Barbenheimer experience is the exception that proves the rule.
Many of us do want to see it in the theater. But if I miss it there, I’ll probably stream it later. If I think about it. Because I have a lot of other stuff on my plate.