theaters,” Stuart Kelban says, a UT professor at Moody College and part of the Department of Radio-Television-Film and an avid movie watcher. People are continuing to develop less of a need to go to the movie theaters and are beginning to realize that they have everything they need right at home. Still, movie theaters will never completely go away. They will always stay around, but will likely be less popular. Because many people did not go to movie theaters for a time, they became less attached to them. This hurt movie theaters, and they were forced to change some things. “I went [to the movie theater] and they said do you want to see [Shang Chi] in 4X? I don’t even know what that is,” Kelban says, “I said sure, let’s go see it. Well they had turned the theater into this kind of interactive experience where wind blows on you and water gets blown on you. The seats, it’s a rollercoaster. And I think they did that to try to lure people back into the theaters. That’s an experience you can’t have at home. Well, my wife and I walked out after a minute. That’s just not how I want to see a movie.” This is not the only reason people are deciding to stay home. Movie theaters are very expensive, and now so more than ever. The prices have risen significantly in an attempt to recover funds lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although this makes sense, even just for families of four this can be really expensive. “That’s four tickets, plus some popcorn, some drinks.
That’s a hundred bucks easy. 100 bucks is a year of Netflix or some other service,” Kelban says. There is so much precaution for filming anything nowadays and even if massive amounts of caution is taken, there is still room for error. These problems are a big pain that filmmakers are facing and managing nowadays. Movie theaters are losing popularity, and people are staying home a lot more often. We have seen the film industry change and adapt to the tyrant that is COVID-19 Despite the many bad effects producers
are facing, it might have been good for the consumer. The film industry is now very different from the one of the past, and will continue to change even more as time goes on. All we can do is watch and see what happens.
Lights Out! - Lights! Camera! Covid? - pg 14
