Wherever technology steps in, reality produces innovation, as well as a few unemployment. Take the music industry, for example, artists start peddling their music online and the records industry went to shambles. The same can be said when CDs were the thing and vinyl and cassettes were still the standards. And when the batch of music stars at that time planted their feet into their mouths with politics (because why not?), sales go down even further. Digital sales are now the main source of income for artists, at least in the west (but that’s another story), and people now pay for single song downloads the most. No one wants to buy a trashy album just so they can listen to that one good song they heard over the radio or saw on Youtube. The 90’s teenager’s collection of CDs and cassettes of his favourite band is now shrunk into a piece of plastics and rare metals that’s light enough to fit in his pocket. CDs are practically dead in the west, at the moment of this writing.
And this isn’t just limited to the music industry: for quite a while, it seems that this should have been the destiny of the cinema industry too. But that seems
So how can that be? With the advent of streaming service, movie theaters should have been dead by now. People don’t visit theaters anymore as much as they use to, sure. But rather than dead, a lot of them are still in operation, and according to Statista, there are about 5,750 movie theaters that are operating in the US since 2017.
Why was it dead again?
According to Cinemablend’s article four years ago, along with a small poll below it, people have been complaining about 4 key reasons:
- It is too expensive. The price at the time of the article was written was around $8.13 to $8.15. In 2017, the tickets rose up to $8.90, according to The National Alliance of Theater Owners, which finally hit $9.00 around last year. So yeah. More so right now, movies are exceptionally expensive. But this data is just from the USA alone. Outside of the Americas, European and Asian countries have ticket prices in double digits, according to the Worldatlas’ data in 2017.
- Good Movies are hard to come by. This might be the reason why there’s a good number of people who said they only come to the movies less than once a week in the data Statista gathered.
- Streaming Options. This is the main reason why a lot of tech people insist that movies will die. Subscriptions to streaming platforms are less than the price of a movie ticket. What’s more, you can watch and pause the movie as you see fit, without leaving the comfort of your own couch. Thankfully, the world has moved on from the days of the dial-up connection and has allowed people to afford HD streaming even with a 5Mbps connection like in the 3rd world countries.
- Stream sites and TV have better quality. This fourth one can be interpreted in 2 ways, but the Cinemablend article interpreted it that movies and TV series are much more entertaining and have better content overall compared to the movies, echoing the second reason. This can also be interpreted in that, due to the advancement of tech, you can now watch movies in high-quality streams: 4k resolution and 60 FPS, although this set up is for the filthy rich only or those who can save up to buy the biggest TV and still afford good internet and Netflix subscription every month.
These are good arguments. So clearly, the movies should have died. Some say that it is dying a slow and painful death, but the doomsayers have been saying it since the 2000s. Youtube was in 2005, and it was only after a year of service that people were pirating and streaming the movies through it. Anythingresearch.com even estimates that the movie
1st Image: Via Pixabay.
2nd Image: Via Statista.
