Steven Spielberg is right: Movies need two months in the theater!

I've been arguing for over five years now, since we started going back to the cinema in the wake of COVID, that movies must spend some time in the theaters before going onto streaming video or some other digital delivery service.  A film represents more than just casual entertainment.  It is the result of the efforts of a lot of people who collaborated together to produce something that, ideally, has not been seen before.  Those people deserve appreciation, and acknowledgement.  Their labors merit watching in as big a venue as is feasible.

When movies come out in the theaters, they can take on a life of their own.  A good movie without much fanfare can become a "sleeper hit" that finds success by word of mouth (two examples of good sleepers are The Artist and My Big Fat Greek Wedding).  Movies get talked about, and vigorously discussed.  It's something that they make an entire art of in places like Europe, where movie goers will often repair to a sidewalk cafe and converse about the movie with friends and family.  That's how we did it when I went to Brussels a long time ago, anyway.

Movies in the old-fashioned way are communal experiences.  Watch a film in your living room, and what can be said about how much you were moved by it.  But seeing a movie in a theater, with other people sharing the same room, and something almost magical happens.  When Avengers: Infinity War came out, on opening night I saw it in a packed theater.  The stunned look on everyone's faces after that movie ended is something I'll never forget.  It was a look that said it all: "Oh crap, NOW what?!  How can there possibly be a good closure to this?!"  You can maybe simulate that at home, but it's just not the same.

A typical movie, not a solid stinker of the sort that Ed Wood used to make, deserves at least two weeks, maybe three, in the theater.  That's enough time to weigh whether it really resonates with audiences.  But then there are some movies that come to demand much more time getting projected onto the big screen.  Those deserve at least a month listed on the marquee... if not more.

I'm not the only one either believing this and in fact I'm in good company.  Steven Spielberg has been at CinemaCon this past week and he had something to say about the time movies spend in the theaters.  Mainly, that there needs to be a sixty-day window for new movies to be available only in theaters.  Bringing up his forthcoming film Disclosure Day, Spielberg said that "This is a movie that needs to be experienced, and what you need to get from the beginning to the end is a seatbelt."

I love having good movies on my iPad.  The night that Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker came out on iTunes, I gleefully loaded it on my tablet so that at last I had the complete Skywalker saga on one device.  Not long ago I finally watched Dune: Part Two and that's on my iPad also.  It's a great convenience to be able to do that.  But it's something that I can wait a little for, if that means more people get to see the movie as its director and producers and cast want and need us to see it as.

I know that I'm not the only one who believes this, who feels this way.  Surely there are other cinemaphiles out there who love the movie-going experience and want others to know what that's like, too.  Maybe they will chime in like Spielberg has, and persuade the studio execs to hold out on the instant gratification of home-audience profits in favor of something deeper and more meaningful, if only for a few months.

Categories: movies, steven spielberg