Sorry Marty. Enough is enough.
The comments herein do not reflect the opinions of anyone but me, the author. I am cranky as hell after yet another horrid experience at our Canadian cinema chain monopoly.
Cineplex Entertainment did not deserve to survive the pandemic. Truly, I’m shocked it did. As a brand, Cineplex has done everything within their power and more, over the past twenty years, to destroy the customer experience of attending a film in Canada, the essential element of their service that only they can provide and no one else can.
Maybe every large movie chain in the world is equally bad. I don’t know, because here in Canada, we have Cineplex. They do not deserve their monopoly, and I’d take it from them if I could. If you want to see a tentpole movie on a screen wider than, say, 18 feet, you have to go to a Cineplex. So when I say that the customer experience of attending a film is the essential element of their service that only Cineplex can provide and no one else can, I don’t just mean with respect to it being the anchoring value proposition of theatrical exhibition in general; I mean, in a lot of real ways, Cineplex is the only option for a movie of a certain scale in this country, at all. Gallingly, the ones you “have to see on the big screen” are the ones that Cineplex violently domineers in the marketplace, leaving smaller chains to feast on smaller films that will be on every digital service within weeks, regardless.
This is not to imply that those films, and those chains, do not deserve patronage; they obviously do. I mean only to say that those non-tentpole distribution models give customers legitimate ranges of choices, whereas Cineplex’s awful model does not.
Every other aspect of Cineplex’s product design — the garish light, the shitty and overpriced arena food, the awful preshow and ads, the video games that gave way to mobile apps that gave way to VR headsets that gave way to… nothing, actually, because nobody wanted that shit — are entertainment features that other industries (more) capably deliver. The one thing that a cinema chain theoretically does that no other industry does, or can do, is present professionally-projected feature films in large-format theatrical venues, in front of crowds of people, in the dark. That is, naturally, the only element of their product design that Cineplex has worked relentlessly to dilute, with a single-mindedness not unreflective of moths into fire.
They rode these suicidal instincts to a financial disaster in 2019 and 2020, when their buyout offer fell through; and then they closed, like most entertainment industries did, when the pandemic swept through the world. And in a sane and valorous version of that world — which, I recognize, this is not — that would have been that. The pandemic was a Great Filter applied internationally to whole hosts of socially-motivated enterprises, killing no small few of them; it should have killed Cineplex, and other movie chains like it, worse than the dinosaurs, simply because it coincided with a second extinction-level event in the same space: the streaming wars. Two asteroids! No waiting! Ka-booooooooom!
Instead, the dinosaurs are back — at Cineplex — and because of Cineplex’s choke-hold on exhibition in Canada, the large-format screen options to see those dinosaurs (or airplanes) (or Thors) are
a) go to Cineplex, or
b) watch something else, in a smaller theatre or on streaming.
I have bad news for Cineplex: my TV is better than your movie theatre.
I have worse news for Cineplex: by and large, so is everybody else’s.
We will have to wait another three or four years to get a full dimensions of the damage that the one-two punch of streaming + pandemic did to theatrical exhibition as a piece of the movie industry; but when it comes, I suspect it will not illuminate much in the way of surprises. Going to a movie as a value proposition simply dissolved in light of paired realities that it was either unsafe, or unsatisfactory.
Unsafe, Cineplex (and other movie chains) had little to do with when the question of how to manage COVID-19 first rose; but, Cineplex sure didn’t do much to mitigate that concern, once theatres started to reopen.
Unsatisfactory, though? How on earth was every waking hour of the closure not spent refocusing Cineplex’s corporate strategy so that presenting professionally-projected feature films in large-format theatrical venues, in front of crowds of people, in the dark, was not quintessentially and measurably more enjoyable at a Cineplex theatre than sitting at home watching Disney+?
Here’s another one: fully acknowledging that post-Avatar, the 3-D gimmick was all but required to get audiences into movie houses, how can any responsible business run on the exhibition of movies continue to imply that the glasses were anything but that: a gimmick? And — additionally — a gimmick with substantial, real-world impacts on the ability of any given audience to see the film they are watching, and thereby consider the experience to have been superior to watching the film on their TVs?
I had a remarkable experience returning to a 3-D experience for the first time. It’s not that I wasn’t particularly vocal about 3-D being silly and unnecessary prior to the pandemic, but post-pandemic — with those oily sunglasses on my face for the first time in two and a half years — I was startled. Taken aback, quite honestly and authentically, by how obviously and incontrovertibly bad the experience of watching a movie in that format actually is. Like peering at the world through horse blinders, or an inverted telescope, or a dirty rag, or all three. We pay for this? When we have 4K, eye-reactive televisions at home?
What startled me wasn’t that 3-D is bad; what startled me was realizing how used to it all I had clearly become. Like I said, I never loved 3-D, but I tolerated it as the (unfortunate) standard practice of going to mainstream movies in the 2010s. Getting away from it for such a lengthy period of time — enough time for my synapses to lose whatever heuristic shortcuts were there, I suppose — and then returning to it was like having all my senses shut down in real time. Again: we pay for this?
(In fact, I’ve said repeatedly and will repeat, that at this point I would pay a substantial markup at a large-screen venue to not have to endure 3-D. I want to see the movies I pay to see, Cineplex. The fact that I need to say that is both a galling abdication of your role in all this, and a business opportunity.)
Amusingly, the 3-D screening in question was preceded by the first footage from Avatar: The Way of Water, which looked so surprisingly exactly like its prior film — now thirteen years ago — that I am not wholly convinced the 3-D revolution can happen a second time. It made me wonder, once again, when filmmakers who truly and earnestly believe in 3-D (James Cameron is certainly one) watch a film in that format, whether they are simply doing it with better tools than are available at a common multiplex. I wish I could have screencapped my own eyesight, as the Avatar trailer played, and sent it to him. Surely that dim, distorted, distant image is not what he, or any other film professional, ever thought there movie would look like going into my eyes. As the trailer ended and the musical refrain of James Horner and Leona Lewis’s “I See You” played, I burst out laughing.