Bobby wrote: The cost of a concert ticket to see a currently relevant band is fucking insane. Even ticket costs to see an old dinosaur band with maybe one or two original members is ridiculous. Lawton is a military town (Fort Sill next door) and it had a LOT of bars and night clubs. I think more than half of them have closed. My theory is quite a few young adults have just "retreated to the bunker" and are living through their computers, phones, video game consoles, etc. They're not leaving the house to socialize as much as they did in the past.
I've been arguing for a long time that the reason we have so many superhero movies is because older people were no longer showing up for intelligent, adult films. I based that on the fact that films released in 2022, such as Death on the Nile, Cyrano, Nope, Amsterdam, The Banshees of Inisherin, The Fablemans, She Said and The Menu all didn't gross well. And I think grosses to date this year also represent that - we're still running about 18% behind pre-pandemic 2019 and 2019 wasn't even that great a year. But while the following is anecdotal (and not data), I went to see Maestro Tuesday night at the Netflix Paris theater (529 seats) and it was practically sold out for a film that everyone knows is going to be streaming on Netflix in a few weeks. And then yesterday, I went to a 2pm show of Poor Things and was surprised to see a great crowd for that time of day - theater was about half full. So anecdotally, maybe adults at least, are starting to return to theaters.
(And by the way, I have to give Netflix some credit: the presentation at the single-screen Paris was fantastic. Movie scores playing before the movie, no ads, just two trailers, curtains that opened and closed before the feature and screen masking, although they didn't mask down to the 1.33 frame of most of the film. The seating did feel crowded, but it felt like a single screen theater and brought back the past for me. AMC claims all new 4K Cinionic Laser projectors at the theaters I patronize. I don't know what the Paris was using, but it looked far better. And yet, the Paris, while owned by Netflix, seems to be operated by BowTie, which frequently did not have a good reputation. Also interestingly, much of both The Maestro and Poor Things were in black & white. A new trend?)
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