The Future of Going to the Movies

It will look rather like going to the opera does now.

My wife recently took a trip with her sister and cousins to Las Vegas. The entertainment highlight of their trip was seeing The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere for something like $135 each. They greatly enjoyed it (even though in the future no doubt movies will be made from the beginning to take advantage of spherical projection and thus be even more enjoyable than Oz merely retrofitted to The Sphere.)

Going to the movies is a 120 year old technology that was rolling along surprisingly strongly up through 2019. But, predictably, the habit of going to the show took a hit during covid from which it has yet to fully recover.

I could imagine the distant future of leaving the house to see a movie,will be rather like grand opera is today: each city will have one one or two unbelievable movie palaces, perhaps one a Sphere, perhaps the other with a traditional screen, each a lavish monument to civic pride, where they will put on, say, a dozen movies per year: some classics and some new movies with colossal budgets.

Donations from elderly rich movie-lovers hoping to inculcate movie appreciation in the younger generations will play a significant economic role in these enterprises.

Movies will …

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