On the evening of 16th March 2020, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announced the start of the lockdown that would attempt to suppress the outbreak of Covid-19, of which one measure was the closure of cinemas across the country, to prevent people coming into close contact within a closed space.
Two days later, my bank sent me six free cinema tickets, to
use at my local multiplex. The current account I have with my bank allows me to
choose an extra perk from a list each year, like a magazine subscription, or
money off in restaurants, but every March, when the bank asks me what I want
next, I always choose the cinema tickets.
On 19th September 2020, I see a film in a cinema
for what was the first time since 23rd February – that film was
“Greed,” the comedy satirising the clothes shop magnates that squeeze
sweatshops for profit, starring Steve Coogan as a Sir Philip Green analogue
that builds a plywood Colosseum using migrant labour to celebrate their
birthday. It was a good film, if earnest at putting its point across, but I
only remembered I saw it after realising that watching “Cats” (a film I still
like) in a cinema was such an overpowering experience, it obliterated the
following two months of film-watching memory – either that, or 2020 has been as
long a year as everyone else has said.
Cinemas in the UK were allowed to reopen from 4th
July, but my local cinema reopened on 7th August, having been
postponed from 10th July. My local chain is Vue, a British chain
partly owned by a Canadian pension fund. However, the gap between its reopening
and my finally walking through the door was entirely mine, as I deliberated
what to see next – the future of local government employees in Ontario depended
on my decision.
The canary in the cinema coalmine, used to gauge how quickly
people would return, was Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” but I did not want to
watch another large film, with a large story, with large ideas, and a large
cast – I am not usually one for blockbuster tentpole films anyway. I had
considered watching the rerelease of an older film, namely “The Empire Strikes
Back,” but I didn’t care enough about Star Wars to watch what has been turned
into the middle film in a middle trilogy. I certainly wouldn’t wait until
November to watch “No Time to Die,” but when it comes to series that define how
Britain is portrayed in film, I am more likely to choose a Carry On film over
James Bond.
So, childhood nostalgia it is – I’m seeing “Bill & Ted
Face the Music,” itself postponed from 21st August, 14th
August, and 28th August, finally arriving on screens on 16th
September. The film itself was great, but you will get more out of it if you
have seen the other two films. Oddly, it felt like it was made by fans of the
first two films, even when you know it was the original team.
As long as it took for me to choose a film to watch, the
bigger problem was at the cinema itself. The capacity of the screen showing
“Bill & Ted” was 422 seats, the biggest in the fourteen-screen multiplex.
The number of people in the audience was FIVE. It may have been 10:10 on a
Saturday morning, but before the lockdown, showing ANY film would get a bigger
audience than five.
Losing access to cinemas for a period of time has run the
risk of upending the idea of films altogether in a way I wouldn’t have thought.
We are now so used to home video releases of films coming only a matter of
weeks after their cinema release, that it becomes ever easier to skip the
cinema release altogether: the Tom Hanks film “Greyhound,” made for $50
million, was released online in July 2020 after the lockdown made its cinema
release impossible. What was meant to have been a Columbia Pictures Release
became a success for Apple TV+ instead. “Trolls World Tour” made a $30
on-demand cost for one film justifiable, later copied by Disney with the
live-action “Mulan,” making the audience being a Disney+ subscriber a
pre-requisite before paying any more. If it is made any easier for film companies
to do this instead, there will be no more need for cinemas.
I prefer to think of cinema as the medium rather than the
film – films are made to be watched in a cinema. Watching a film in any other
circumstance takes away from the singular focus on the screen. All TV screens, and
especially all mobile phone screens, are too small for cinema, too inadequate
to deal with intimate detail and expansive views. Both the sound and vision of cinema
do not have to complete with that is happening outside where the film is
playing, but once it leaves, that is all that ever happens – films can be shown
on television, and films can be posted to YouTube, but films are not
television, and films are not YouTube.
I have five free tickets left – my cinema will have these
well before next March.
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