A poll of US film studio executives reveals a widespread belief that traditional cinemas will cease to be viable within 20 years.
Analyst and author Stephen Follows has a great website for tracking all of the important numbers from any film you might care to look up. Having conducted a poll of 240 US-based film industry executives, Follows has presented some rather sobering outcomes – the most worrying being a widespread belief among those surveyed that within two decades, cinemas will no longer play the same role.
Of the 240 executives polled, 55 percent believe that the “traditional movie-going” experience will no longer be a viable business model sometime within the next two decades. Interestingly, it was the executives working in sales, distribution and production who held the most pessimistic views on cinema’s future. Those working in theatrical exhibition, such as cinema operators, were generally more optimistic. Worryingly, though, executives who work solely in theatrical exhibition were the largest proportion of voters to state that their side of the business would last ‘under five years.’
That’s a sobering statistic, considering it emerges from those charged with making the sector function. Other data makes for difficult reading, too. The poll also found that nearly 90 percent of US exhibition executives have confirmed that their revenue hasn’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Furthermore, 81 percent want a return of exclusive theatrical windows of at least six weeks – a topic that has been debated repeatedly of late.
Read more: Martin Scorsese admits he’s stopped watching films in cinemas
Unsurprisingly, 77 percent of those surveyed believe day-and-date streaming releases have hurt the theatrical model, and from where we’re sitting, it’s hard to disagree. Follows does point out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that executives think that this sounds the death knell for cinemas entirely, only that the sector will have to adapt into something newer to survive. In the piece – covered by Variety – he states “it could be that the ‘traditional cinema experience’ evolves and changes with the times, meaning that the people, companies and locations survive but in a different form.”
Still, it makes for pretty hard reading on a Monday morning, doesn’t it? The death of cinema has been greatly exaggerated before, so hopefully this is just another false alarm. But it does illustrate just how low confidence is in the exhibition sector right now.
