Nothing pairs better with a cold rainy Sunday and a warm baby Loxodonta quite like a Rockaway Nitro Black Gold Stout. About one-third of the way through Tim Burton’s Dumbo, I ordered a second, and as it was delivered to me in the dark, I was struck by the scene where V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton)–evil, conniving moneybags and Dreamland amusement park owner–explains to the scrappy, DIY road circus owner Max Medici (Danny DeVito) that of course he should bring his entire operation, airborne pachyderm included, into his opulent fold. Why? Because the future of entertainment is bringing the people to you, not the other way around.
In the age of streaming and on-demand and bit-torrenting and hyper-speed release cycles and home theaters and even apparently, 1%-ers getting Endgame delivered right to their in-home Imaxes or whatever, there’s a school of thought that where you see a movie doesn’t matter. “I don’t disagree that going to the theater to see a movie is a great experience,” Netflix chief creative officer Ted Sarandos told the press last December. “I don’t think emotionally it’s a different experience than seeing a movie on Netflix. It is a different physical experience for sure.”
But the “old-fashioned” way of paying money to sit in a windowless room with a bunch of strangers hasn’t diminished at all. In fact, it’s flourishing and the options are growing. The major players like AMC, Regal, and Cinemark dominate, but this new breed of theater is increasingly seen as an opportunity for growth. Last fall, Marcus, the number-four player, acquired the New Orleans-based Movie Tavern chain for $126 million. Dallas’s Studio Movie Grill and Alamo, which is headquartered in Austin, both cracked 2019’s Giants of Exhibition list published by industry analyst Boxoffice, ranking number 13 and 17 respectively. “These types of theaters came up with solutions to problems that for most of the life of cinema, moviegoers didn’t know they had,” says Stephanie Zacharek, film reviewer for Time and a 2015 Pulitzer finalist for criticism while at the Village Voice. “There’s a lot of talk about television and movies morphing into a great blob of entertainment, that there is no difference, and it drives me crazy.” As we saw late last year with the Netflix controversies around whether and how Roma would receive a theatrical release, serious filmmakers want a theatrical release because they want to share their art on a large-screen canvas. And if you can do it in a seat that’s both comfortable and reservable, and where the truffle popcorn can be paired with something quaffable, like say an $85 bottle of Piper-Heidsieck Champagne (as you can at iPic), all the better. “Overall, the movie business is healthy,” says Daniel Loria, editorial director of Box office, which has covered movie theaters since 1920. “What is dying is the standard suburban, cookie-cutter multiplex model, with the tacky carpet and uniform concessions.”
As someone who has probably averaged two theatrical movies a month for 40-odd years, I wholeheartedly agree. As should already be evident, the current wave of full-services movie houses isn’t solely a New York or Los Angeles phenomenon. It’s happening in underserved markets all across the country at independent single screens and small regional chains, such as Flix Brewhouse, across the Midwest and Southwest where beer is made onsite.
So how is the theatrical landscape being completely upended by the growth of these places? To find out where we are and where we’re headed in this future of full-service moviegoing, I immersed myself in Gotham’s new cinematic universe–well, within a short jaunt at least–while also exploring a city with a longstanding brew-and-view culture and then going back to where it all began for me, the place central to my filmic evolution–a town starting from scratch.