Movie Theaters Vs. Home
Despite living within walking distance of a theater, and loving movies in general, gotta admit theater viewing has fallen off a lot recently. For a variety of reasons:
- Going to a theater can be expensive ($10 a ticket); even more with the obligatory snack / meal aspect, or 3D glasses.
- Not many interesting movies — looking at the listings I’m lucky if there’s one or two movies that sound worth paying $10 for — often there’s nothing.
- Theater annoyances — far too many previews / commercials, long lines for snacks, no seats, people talking, etc. What’s particularly annoying how the previews and crowds work against each other — avoiding previews by showing up late often means bad seating, and showing up early = watching fifteen previews and ads.
- The home viewing experience is pretty darned good. Besides a personal widescreen with ideal seating, you can pause for bathroom breaks, get snacks, surf the web, or clean the cat litter while watching the flick.
- Backlog of content just waiting to be enjoyed at home, what with Netflix, DVD rentals, classic movie DVD rips etc.
As a result I think I’ve sadly seen only two or three movies in the theater this year. It seems the traditional movie-going experience is now reserved for movies that I can’t wait to see right away (rare), or are epic enough that they should be seen on a huge screen (Avatar comes to mind, but also rare). Otherwise, I’m more than happy to wait for the rental.
How’s your movie theater patronage holding up?
We’ve only been to 2 movies at a theater in the past year or so and both were Pixar movies — and I had to take my little guy out to the lobby to settle down during both Toy Story 3 and Cars 2 despite the fact that he’s watched the earlier installations at home many times. Some of it might be the immersive nature of the movie theater, but I think the violent content was the bigger issue with both.
Mostly, we sneak in movies after our son’s bedtime, so that sorta limits the locale to our living room.
Yeah I can see theater outings being limited with young kids, or if a family has multiple kids a movie theater could turn into an expensive evening.
Speaking of violent content, I watched Close Encounters recently, and I remember as a kid, my parents going to see it in the theater and leaving me at home with grandma because it would be too scary for me. They bought me a Close Encounters comic book, though. And when I did see it on TV many years later (still a kid) the only things I can recall were the part where the kid gets abducted and the mothership ending.
And the only part of Star Wars I remember from my first childhood viewing was being scared by the Jawas, the burned bodies of Luke’s family, and the torture robot Darth Vader uses on Leia. After that, according to my folks, I fell asleep…
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