Box-office enthusiasts obsessing over the weekly reports in 2024 might be in need of a full head, neck and shoulder massage from all the whiplash. One minute, everything is doomed and Challengers is already on video-on-demand even while still getting first-time viewers into cinemas; the next, Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is raking in a billion dollars and Longlegs is making indie horror history for NEON. 

Cinemas have taken many hits over the past half-century. Streamers, the pandemic, the popularity of gaming, the rise of living costs, the lowering of attention spans, the film workers’ strikes—you name it, pundits have mentioned it. While Covid unquestionably impacted theaters, I reckon history will show that it had a beneficial impact on audience development. 

Hear me out: Letterboxd experienced a huge growth in new in those long lockdown days, and while folks sheltered at home, our data shows they ventured deep into filmographies, genres and unseen classics, creating a new generation of film-literate movie fans eager to see pictures old and new on the big screen, often for the first time, and not only at the multiplex. 

“It’s very exciting,” Michael Mann tells us, during a forthcoming conversation around American Cinematheque’s Board of Directors; one of their Los Angeles art house cinemas, The Egyptian, screened his Letterboxd Top 250 thriller Heat back in January. “The question was asked: for how many of you was this the first time you’re seeing it on a big screen? About 85 percent had never seen it on a screen, and we make these things for big screen. The intensity of experience to me, every minor calibration that we do… is for that kind of a massive impact. It’s not that I want audiences to be there ively, it’s that I want them in the film.”

Spooky that Mann should mention 85 percent. In a recent survey we conducted, that same slice of our community had seen one or more films in a picture house in the previous month. Almost a quarter of the 5,100 respondents had watched six or more movies in theaters in one month, ’cos it’s always showtime! For comparison, Fandango’s 2024 Moviegoing Trends and Insights report shows two thirds of their surveyed ticket buyers watched at least four movies in theaters in the whole of the past year. Letterboxd are among the most moviegoing of folk, yet our review pages are still stacked with variations on CA’s plaintive “currently regretting missing this in theaters.” (Sorry to Goran Stolevski’s tender queer bogan romance, Of an Age).

So, with Art House Convergence’s July 25 Art House Theater Day in our sights, the Journal team spent the first half of 2024 hitting up red carpets and awards ceremonies to quiz filmmakers and other Letterboxd pals about what they think audiences and the industry alike can do, right now, to keep our beloved movie churches afloat and ready to surf the 2025 tidal wave of cinema. We’ve collected their ideas into eight insights. Pop that corn, and read on. 

1. Tell us nothing. We already know too much.

We’re savvy, we’re jaded, we know how marketing campaigns work. We don’t want the whole film told to us in the trailer. We want to have fun, we want to follow breadcrumbs, to call a number on a billboard and have Nic Cage’s voice freak us out. We want, in my case, our elderly fathers-in-law to randomly ask one day, “Have you heard about the scariest horror film of the last ten years? Starring Nicolas Cage?” At that point I hadn’t, and damned if I wasn’t going to respect a stealth campaign that could haul him in. 

Naturally I insisted he be my date to the neighborhood art house’s preview of Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs. The film, picked up at EFM Berlin in 2023 by indie darling NEON, was tracking to open in early July at $7 million USD. Instead it shipped a whopping $22 million in US ticket sales across three days of opening weekend. Global earnings in the first ten days topped $47 million for a production reported to cost just $10 million. It’s the first indie horror to make such a financial splash since The Blair Witch Project 25 years ago, which we also knew scant about going into cinemas.    

Dropping Longlegs into a summer of Twisters and Deadpool & Wolverine is a smart piece of programming that mirrors last year’s Talk to Me, which A24 sneaked into air-conditioned theaters as an indie horror alternative to Barbie and Oppenheimer. The foyer was buzzing after the Longlegs screening with a crowd divided loosely into those spooked out of their seats (me) and those entertained by the schlocky pantomime of plot-holes (also me, tbh). The majority planned to see it again soon to spot all the demons they missed. And as the repeat reviews roll in, so do cryptic messages from “Mr Downstairs”, who’s been lurking in Letterboxd comments.

2. Give the kids the keys—to cinema and to the industry. 

First, we need to make an audience out of them. Film literacy starts at birth. “I’m gonna speak to people who are parents and say ‘take your kids to the movies’, and not the movies that the industry considers for children, but the movies that people like me grew up [with], which is every kind of cinema available,” says filmmaker Ira Sachs (ages, Love is Strange). “Take your kids to westerns, take your kids to musicals, take your kids to noir, take your kids to foreign films, art films. Explode the idea of what is right for an audience. Think about Martin Scorsese. What was his childhood cinema going like? Try to mirror that. My father took me to Death Wish when I was nine.”

Death Wish was not on the programme for this year’s family-focused Around the World in 8 Days film festival, but The Beatles’ trippy Yellow Submarine was, alongside films from Studio Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon, and a live-soundtracked screening of The Pink Panther from 1963. “It feels really important to me to bring people together into cinemas,” says Nicola Marshall, the director of Square Eyes Screen Foundation, which produces the New Zealand festival. “There’s so many ways to watch things now but for me there’s still nothing cooler than sitting in a theater with people we love and people we’ve just met and be transported away to somewhere completely different for a little moment in time.” 

Her friend Bret McKenzie, Oscar-winning songwriter for The Muppets, half-Conchord and father-of-three, agrees: “What I love about going to the movie theater is that you completely escape reality. The music, the size of the screen, it becomes other-worldly. You just don’t get that feeling at home where you’re distracted by life and the dogs.” 

We’re not talking solely about programming for children, either. The trick is also to let younger people do the programming. Whoever at AMC scheduled Shrek 2 at 9pm on a Wednesday in April needs a raise. It’s the perfect Gen-Z hump-day, post-dinner, date-night timing. The kind of programming we see more often at art house theaters than Middle America’s family-owned legacy chains. Things are precarious in the theatrical landscape, for sure, and the relationship between cinema owners and studios is delicate, with films and ticket prices locked in many weeks in advance, making it tricky to respond to what audiences are vibing on.     

It’s this “crackpot theory” that Fennessey thinks is driving the sold-out repertory screenings that art house theaters are enjoying lately. “It’s all kind of interconnected. The chaos of repertory screenings where you’re like, ‘I have no idea what’s coming next but it’s exciting’... It’s not like, ‘Oh I looked at the release calendar and in six months I’ll be getting Fast 11 and I gotta put my hat on for that one.’ It’s more like, ‘they programmed what?!? Let’s go!’” 

3. Bring back the classics 

“Please show more old movies in theaters,” Film Forum’s “SPIELBERG”, a two-week season this September of the director’s blockiest busters, all being shown in 35mm.  

For Art House Theater Day, Park Circus has brought the 40th anniversary 4K restoration of Star Wars trilogy for May the Fourth. Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables for Mothers’ Day. Pulp Fiction’s 30th anniversary. Run Lola Run, fresh as the day it was made. Interstellar, just because. These screenings are regularly packed out. 

“We did a live show at the Prince Charles Cinema in London in May, which was really fun,” Fennessey recalls. “We showed Phantom Thread. It was a sold out event of engaged people, all under 40, and then we got outside and there was a massive line around the block on a Saturday afternoon for the 5pm showing of Interstellar. All people under 40. Something’s going on.”

4. Take the heat off opening weekend

This is a controversial one. Opening weekends are sacred. There is absolutely no doubt that a film’s money-making potential in theaters happens right up front, and drops off as soon as the next cool thing comes along. Even a beast like Oppenheimer made most of its domestic millions in the first 45 days of its 123-day theater exclusivity window. Those films also spend millions to make those millions and want to make the most of the noise created. And the well-resourced studios have the firm ear of cinema owners, able to book up screening slots across many weeks in advance. 

But the window between a film being in cinemas and landing on streaming is inconsistent these days (more on that below) and audiences are out of practice in of seizing their moment before it’s gone. Daisy Ridley, who has served several rounds on the blockbuster circuit in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, knows word of mouth takes time to build, and “people don’t have time, always, to go to the thing when it’s out in the first weekend. People have busy lives. In the last few months I’ve tried to go to stuff and I’m like ‘it’s literally gone already’.”

More recently, the actress played the lead in Sometimes I Think About Dying, Rachel Lambert’s sweetly rom-comic meditation on mundanity and mental health, which had a limited theatrical release back in January. She knows well that indies—even the most creatively marketed ones—can take a beat to find their audience champions, by which point there are no screening slots available in the weeks following release. 

In some cases, scarcity can be the answer. Ridley points to recent rom-com Anyone But You, which managed to sustain decent ticket sales through a modest offering of showtimes. “It was given enough space to continue to do it.” Anyone But You’s director Will Gluck (who has directed Ridley in Peter Rabbit) joked in an earlier Letterboxd interview that “extremely low expectations” became the accidental key to his film’s success. “My whole career has been lowering the bar. And when your bar is so low that it’s on the ground, they don’t book six screens per theater. They book one or two per theater. So that actually helped us: because there’s only one or two screens per theater, they were always full. So that kind of got hype, and everyone got excited about it”. 

Big studios, with their decades-long relationships with theatrical exhibitors, work hard to bag the best showtimes—especially the lucrative weekend sessions. It’s a steep climb for a low-budget movie to get into cinemas in the first place, let alone expand beyond the first week, when their showtimes are less accessible. “Could there be less showings and more days? I don’t know,” Ridley muses. “But yes, putting emphasis on the whole run as opposed to the opening weekend, I feel like, might be helpful. It wouldn’t feel so binary that either something succeeded or it didn’t.”

It’s precisely because word-of-mouth is strong, rewatches are mounting up and memed marketing materials are just hitting socials that the studios jump on the buy-or-rent train so quickly. They can negotiate a higher price for sending a film to paid video-on-demand within a certain window. For blockbusters, lately it’s six weeks after theatrical release; the price drops again around the twelve-week point, but there’s no “industry standard” and this adds to the confusion, which is unsettling to audiences. It’s all about making money, and fast, while all the marketing is still in circulation, in order to offset the cost of the film. 

And hey, movies are expensive to make, in part because they’re a collectively made artform (and the collective is struggling, fam). But truncated windows run the danger of conditioning audiences to stay home knowing they can watch a new film from their couches in a few short weeks. Fair enough: home is comfortable. People spend good money on audio-surround lounge situations. 

But what’s missed in making that choice? Take Longlegs: there is an aspect-ratio change near the start, absolutely drenched in red, that has the vibes of a velvet curtain parting. It feels utterly immersive in the cinema. And that’s just the opening. At my screening, it also helped to know I wasn’t alone in getting the giggles at certain points. In fact, the crowd energy is what elevated my own rating from a horror-standard 2.2 all the way to a perfect 3.5 out of five stars.)   

Jemaine Clement agrees. The filmmaker, actor and Flight of the Conchords member, whose small-screen series Time Bandits, based on the 1981 film of the same name (one of his childhood favorites) has just landed on Apple TV+, says: “It’s great to hear a whole audience. When a whole audience is excited, it’s exciting to be there.” 

In fact, The Ankler story continues, 45 percent of American twenty-somethings are “living with their parents and forming close friendships with them (sharing clothes, music tastes, career views).” Letterboxd affirm this in lists that keep track of films we’ve watched with family , from the general (“with my grandma”) to the specific (“with my uncle during lambing season night shifts”, “queer movies my grandpa is making me watch with him after I came out”). 

And at a time when our attention is being pulled in so many directions, actor Franz Rogowski (ages, Undine, Andrea Arnold’s 2024 Cannes darling Bird), theorizes that movies might be the answer to collectively rebuilding our ability to stay in the moment. “It might be boring,” he couches his advice, “but you have to reduce your short attention span activities, otherwise you just lose the capacity to stay with someone’s idea for a certain amount of time.” 

7. Consider every room a cinema 

“However good the streamers are, you’re watching it in isolation and that’s not the right way to experience films. It’s a collective experience,” says British screen legend Ken Loach (Sorry We Missed You, Kes, I, Daniel Blake). “Laughter’s contagious, sadness is contagious, anger is contagious, and to experience something as a collective, that’s our real strength, you know? There’s so much that atomizes and divides and reduces us to individuals in the digital age. The collective experience is what’s great about [the] theater.”

Of course, this is socialist king Ken Loach. He’s not here for showing films only in movie palaces, for profit. Solidarity is found by meeting and serving people where they are, so Loach’s distributors work with community groups who “can hire the film for a hundred quid or less, charge for ission and then they keep the takings. They show it in football clubs, community centers, church halls or whatever, have a discussion afterwards, have a chat. And that reaches parts of communities in cities where people would not think of going to the cinema.” 

8. Just… go to the movies! 

We already have time travel. It’s called “going to the movies”. The Greeks know all about it: the chronos (chronological time, the seconds that are ticking right now, the 90 minutes the movie takes to run) and the kairos (the time we spend lost in moments, the time in which time doesn’t matter, the lifetime we experience in that 90-minute runtime).

To enter a darkened picture house is to fall into the liminal space between clock-time and dream-time, chasing that magical, post-credits feeling of being forever changed while the neighborhood has been going about its regular business. 

There’s also a curious intimacy to seeing a film in a public space. Writing of Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s comionate new thespian drama Ghostlight, Alicos shares, “I’m so glad I had the opportunity to watch this in a theater because it made this so so much more personal.” 

It doesn’t matter what’s showing, Sheila Atim reckons. We need to be open-minded, to take chances, otherwise “there’s too much pressure on trailers and cast-lists and all these things to galvanize people to leave the house. I say this as someone who hates leaving the house! I really believe in the communion of going to the cinema space and experiencing film.” 

Actor and producer Harris Doran, who produced D. Smith’s acclaimed documentary Kokomo City, plainly sums up the risks of not going, especially when it comes to independent films. “You have to show up because if you don’t show up they’re not going to put more in the theaters. I feel very ionately about this: go to the theater. Often. In groups. Have, like, movie week. Go.”