Pop Stuff: The Year Cinema Didn't Die

Cinema fulfills a basic human yearning to connect

- SOLEIL NATHWANI

AMONGST THE PLEASURES THE PANDEMIC CLAIMED, GOING TO THE MOVIES WAS HIGH ON THE LIST. 2020 was the year that many said cinema with a little ‘c’, the cinema of the small budget film, was finished. By the end of last year, the second-largest U.S. cinema chain, Regal, had declared bankruptcy and the largest, AMC, had vowed on a quarterly investor call to fight to the death. In a doomy trifecta, Sean Connery passed away, the latest Bond release, No Time to Die, was rescheduled for the third time due to Covid and last month Amazon announced that it was buying MGM Studios, 007’s longtime home. Warner Bros. did the unthinkable by releasing its much-awaited Wonder Woman sequel on the HBO Max streaming service concurrently with cinemas, because people weren’t leaving their homes. This was just a prelude to Warner’s decision to stream their entire 2021 film slate. The much-revered theatrical window, that sliver of time when you can only see a movie in theaters, the thing which used to make a movie a movie, had collapsed. Those of us lucky enough to have them, turned instead to screens on our walls or in our palms. If the landscape was changing for cinematic franchises, that bring in billions by spawning video games, figurines and Halloween costumes on top of on-screen thrills, the prognosticators foresaw little hope for the Indie.