Glance at the lineup of films at your local cinema and you might briefly believe you have passed through a time portal. Stirring athletics biopic Chariots of Fire sits cheek by jowl with schmaltzy Tom Hanks fable Forrest Gump; magical Japanese animation My Neighbour Totoro finds houseroom next to melancholic Hungarian art film Werckmeister Harmonies; 1990s action yarn The Mummy galumphs alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s paranoid 70s classic The Conversation. The surge of reissues and restorations appears unstoppable. This week sees the release of a new edit of the notoriously sleazy Caligula, first released in 1979, with the Tex-Mex crime story Lone Star (1996) and Coraline (2009) to follow shortly.
Previously they were largely the preserve of organisations such as the BFI making archive treasures available on the big screen, or to publicise home entertainment releases on DVD and Blu-ray, the surge is in part down to simple issues of supply and demand. According to Jack Reid Bell, sales and marketing director of reissue specialist distributors Park Circus, the drying-up of the industry pipeline due to the pandemic and then the writers’ and actors’ strikes, left cinemas casting about to fill their screens. “It gave cinemas, who may not have had much of a tradition of playing reissues, really strong results when they did that. And it’s just continued from then. I suspect the appetite has always been there, but that the market hasn’t been geared to it.”
Box office statistics suggest there is money to be made – not to the same extent, perhaps, as a heavily marketed blockbuster, but lucrative enough. My Neighbour Totoro landed in the Top 10 in the UK last weekend, with nearly £70,000 in receipts, while the reissue of the 2002 superhero film Spider-Man took more than £250,000. The Mummy, featuring Brendan Fraser in his action-movie heyday, made more than £100,000 at the box office on the first weekend of its rerelease in July. Reid Bell cites research from data analysts Gower Street and Comscore that shows box office returns in the UK for classic films in 2023 has grown by 133% compared to the pre-pandemic average between 2017-2019.
I think we’re well on our way to the end-game for cinemas. They will ultimately serve two audiences, of course with some overlap, but a limited one from a commercial POV.
Movie theaters will be for (1) those in search of a spectacle that is truly amplified by absolutely massive speakers and screens (think about the proliferation of IMAX, that found its initial success as an immersive way to do museum short-films), and (2) film buffs who want to consciously optimize their viewing well past the average movie-watcher’s point of diminishing returns. That could be for nostalgia or because they deeply enjoy the detailed nuances that go into filmmaking that filmgoing experience, or some sort of blend of both. So yeah, you are going to end up with action-y blockbusters (which hopefully will continue to include a certain number that also sneak in some heart and cleverness), and re-releases/arthouse stuff.
We’re 75 years late, but the fears of movie moguls in 1950 are finally being realized: accessible home setups for “TV” have finally reached the point where a critical mass of people don’t feel like they need a cinema with any regularity. And that’s fine. Opera and other forms of live theater never disappeared. Fountain pens are thriving in their niche. Car enthusiasts will be mail-ordering gasoline 50 years beyond the point where 99% of cars are electric. When something better for the mass market comes along, older stuff settles into the use cases where its relative advantages are appreciated.