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And the logic of fan culture - the strenuous defense of favorites, the shaming and shunning of haters, the ascendancy of feeling over argument - extends into the most esoteric reaches of online cinephilia. The franchises are in the business of fan recruitment and brand extension. Global blockbusters, engineered to appeal to the widest possible mass audience, are conversation-stoppers by definition, offering vague themes and superficially complex plots rather than food for thought. The big I.P.-driven studio movies grow less interesting as a matter of policy, while the smaller releases cater to the interests of splintered, self-selected communities of taste. I fear that movies are becoming less special and more specialized. But those movies occupy a tiny corner of the vast algorithmic universe.

#Movies in theaters now archive#

Still, the archive is there, growing every month, at least for as long as the companies that hold the rights to the movies find a way to monetize them. Publications like this one may issue warnings about titles that are about to leave a given platform, or print ranked lists and anniversary oral histories, but most of the archive at our fingertips is fated to remain unexplored. Movies exist in the digital ether alongside myriad other forms of amusement and distraction, deprived of a sense of occasion. When everything is accessible - and I know it’s not literally everything, and not equally accessible to everyone - then nothing is special. The sheer variety of movies now available for purchase or rental or via streaming subscriptions is a source of astonishment to an old-timer like me, even as it’s taken for granted by my children, students and younger colleagues.

What changed all that was a home-viewing revolution that began with video stores and cable channels like Turner Classic Movies and the old Bravo (which used to show a lot of foreign-language films, believe it or not). Obsessive interest in movies was best fed by digging up old reviews and Mad magazine satires.

Some places had local repertory houses or campus film societies, but otherwise your best chance to catch something old or weird was on a local UHF station during off-hours. I’m old enough to remember when most movies were hard, and in many cases impossible, to see. But worrying is my nature, and part of my job. It’s too early to say where it’s all going, and there’s reason for optimism as well as worry. How we watch is changing, which means that what and why we watch are changing, too. This moment may turn out to be one of seismic alteration, akin to the introduction of sound at the end of the ’20s or the collapse of the studio system decades later. Quite apart from the disruptions of the coronavirus, the culture of movies - the cosmos of assumptions and aspirations that drive audiences and artists beyond the imperatives of commerce - feels more than usually unstable, more uncertain, more charged with peril and possibility. Franchised blockbusters sucking up the theatrical oxygen as smaller, more idiosyncratic films fought over a dwindling share of the market daring movies from festivals buried in Netflix algorithms or marooned in the video-on-demand hinterlands a shrinking cultural footprint for art in an expanding universe of content: Is that the normal we want? Not that everything was great beforehand. Which doesn’t mean the status quo has been restored. “Black Widow,” simultaneously released in theaters and on Disney+, provided a superhero fix.Īll of which is just to say the pandemic-accelerated fear that streaming would kill moviegoing has been proven wrong. The same might be said for the “Quiet Place” sequel, a serviceable horror film that helped fans recover the specific pleasure of being scared in the company of strangers. Whether or not this was a good movie, it undoubtedly offered a good time at the movies, and as such a reminder of what we had been missing and what we really cared about. But after more than a year of subsisting on screening links, we found the critical zones of our cerebral cortices flooded with fan endorphins. Let’s be honest: In ordinary times, the bloat and incoherence of this late installment in a weathered franchise might have elicited a measure of skepticism, if not outright scorn. Vin Diesel, the “Fast and Furious” patriarch, declared that “cinema is back!” and who wants beef with Vin Diesel?Ĭertainly not the critics - I was one of them - who greeted the almost 150 minutes of extravagant action, baroque plotting and high-octane sentimentalism of “F9” with gentle sighs of gratitude.

#Movies in theaters now full#

In the past month or so, as pandemic restrictions have eased and multiplexes and art houses have edged toward full capacity, a handful of releases have done well enough at the box office to feed hopes of a return to pre-Covid normalcy.

#Movies in theaters now movie#

What I’m asking is whether you’ve gone back to a movie theater yet. Have you seen “ F9”? How about “ A Quiet Place Part II”? “ Black Widow”? “ Zola”?