The argument for the cinema has always been made on the wrong terms. Its defenders talk about screen size, sound quality, picture resolution — as if the competing platform were a slightly inferior television. This misses the point almost completely. The cinema was never primarily a delivery mechanism for film. It was a social technology: a way of watching something difficult in public, alongside strangers, and being changed by the fact that they were changed alongside you.
That experience is irreplaceable, and we are in the process of replacing it. Global cinema attendance fell by over 40% between 2019 and 2023. Recovery has been partial and uneven. The independent and arthouse sector — where cinema as a form does its most interesting work — has recovered least.
The Phenomenology of the Dark Room
There is something specific that happens to perception in a cinema. The darkness removes the visual competition of the surrounding environment. The scale exceeds peripheral vision, producing a kind of immersive surrender that no domestic screen can replicate. And crucially: the presence of other people — their laughter, their silence, their audible discomfort — adds a layer of meaning that watching alone cannot generate. Shared experience is not the same as individual experience had simultaneously. It is a different kind of experience altogether.
The darkness of the cinema removes the visual competition of ordinary life. You cannot check your phone because the film has become your only horizon.
What the Statistics Don't Say
The most concerning trend is not attendance figures for blockbusters — those have partially recovered. It is the collapse of the audience for films that require something from the viewer: patience, unfamiliarity, the willingness to sit with a narrative that does not resolve tidily. These films now go directly to streaming, where they are watched in fragments, with notifications on, while doing something else. They are technically seen. They are not experienced.