IN SHUTDOWN, A GLIMPSE OF LIFE WITHOUT MOVIE

Jennifer Page jokes that four months in, this decade is already the worst of her life.

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A server at a nearby resort, she’s out of work due to the pandemic. After someone tested positive at her mother’s nursing home, Page moved her into a room off the dining room. Two weeks ago, her father died. The day after his memorial, she and her family went for a walk, and her 5-year-old daughter, Roxa, asked for something coveted by children for more than a century.

“She was just like, ‘Mama, when this is over, can we go to the movies?’” recalled Page, 36, of Buffalo. “She went through the whole process of going to the movies. She said, ‘We can get popcorn and each have our own drink and each get a candy.’”

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing Americans to journey through hardship without some of the reliable comforts of hard times. One of them is the movies. For more than a century, movie theaters have been a refuge, a communal escape, a place for popcorn-chomping-dreaming-with-your-eyes-open transportation away from everything else.

A world without movie theaters, like the one we’re temporarily inhabiting, has long been foretold. It’s been predicted with every major technological advancement in media, and especially since the advent of streaming. Cinemas, so inconveniently located outside the home, are a dinosaur, analysts have said — one that’s on its way out.