Read on Twitter
I don’t know if I should brace myself for the end of theaters. But I am seeing a lot of comments to the effect of “democracy is being able to watch everything from my couch.” I guess that’s true, in a sense, but Jesus H Christ. https://twitter.com/antovolk/status/1315776722806153216
How much of the cheerful acceptance of the death of theatrical filmgoing is really displaced depression over wages being stagnant since 1980 and people just being too damned exhausted at the end of the week to go out?
Put it another way: movies are not “too expensive” in an objective sense. It’s just at the cost of maintaining the theatrical system has risen with inflation & wages have not. A US first run movie ticket used to cost a half of one hours’ wages. Now it costs 2 to 3 hours’ or more.
Yeah, I’m grasping at straws here, and I’m depressed about all of this stuff because I love movie theaters and going to the movies and I really think it’s a collective embrace of diminished expectations to say “it’s fine, nobody actually really needs it.“
I really think, post-pandemic, that if people made 20 or $25 an hour minimum wage, a lot of this “I am content to experience everything on my phone, going out is elitist“ sentiment would recede drastically, and almost immediately.
TL; DR: theatrical movie going, live music, mom and pop restaurants, small bookstores, and a lot of other things would not be such precarious businesses if everybody made a living wage.
It is not a coincidence that so many businesses whose success is predicated on getting people out of their homes and into a room started suffering in direct proportion to how the US income gap started to widen in the 80s.
Preceding thread is why I can never really entirely cosign any analysis of the state of the entertainment industry that doesn’t take income inequality and stagnant wages into consideration.
