Today’s reflection begins – as so do many things in my life – with me being utterly horrified by something my 12th-grade students consider a common practice. As the teacher who puts all of my geeky tendencies on display, students often ask me if I’ve played a new video game (I have not), watched a new TV show (sometimes), or seen the newest movie (not as often as I would like). And I enjoy discussing movies with them, but I am sometimes baffled when I realize they’ve seen new movies, first-run movies that are still in theaters, not IN a theater, but on their PHONE.

The legality of how this is accomplished aside, I get an absolute quiver down my spine when I think about watching a movie like Spider-Man: Brand New Day on a screen that can fit in the palm of my hand. Movies, especially movies heavy on action and special effects, are intended to be an immersive experience, something that draws you into that world, and I just can’t see how that’s possible when you’re looking at a telephone screen. It gets even worse, though, when the student tells me that they watch these movies not on an app designed for such a thing like Netflix or Disney+, but broken down into 90-second segments on TikTok.

They even watch it vertically.

Excuse me, I just threw up a little in my mouth.

Studios are aware of this practice, of course, and many of them are trying to make content specifically to appeal to this audience: short-form videos have become more popular, “vertical dramas” are now a thing. Even major studio releases seem to be feeling the impact. For instance, there’s a theory floating around concerning Disney’s upcoming animated feature Hexed. When the trailer dropped, the kind of people who spend way too much time thinking about movie trailers noted that a greater-than-normal percentage of the action seems to be focused on the center of the screen, suggesting that Disney made the film with the intent of having the sides chopped off and shown vertically. Disney has not confirmed these suspicions, and honestly, I don’t know that I believe them either, but the fact that the question is even being asked says a lot about how people consume media these days.

I know I am marking myself as an old person when I say things like this. I know that younger generations do things in different ways and they have the right to do so. And most of the time I try to employ a “live and let live” attitude when it comes to things the kids do that don’t affect me. But I’m sorry, boys and girls, this is a time when you’re just flat-out wrong. Our field of vision was designed to be experienced in widescreen, not tallscreen, as demonstrated by this highly-detailed and especially scientific diagram:

It’s incredible to me that we are now making content that defies the millions of years of evolution that placed our eyes side-by-side on our face instead of stacked one on top of the other because people are too lazy to turn their phones 90 degrees. 

But that’s not even the point. The kids obviously still want to watch movies, as evidenced by the fact that they are watching them. But they’re not particularly interested in going to a theater, and that wounds me deeply, because they’re not getting the experience that was intended. 

This weekend I’m going to the movie theater for the ninth time this year. For some people that seems like an exorbitant amount, but I need to remind you that in my younger days, the days before I had a child to consider, I would go to the movies two or three times a week. I love movies. I love the movie theater experience. And while that experience was curtailed greatly first by parenthood and then by the pandemic shutting theaters down for most of a year, I spent all that time pining away for seat D11 in Auditorium 2 like a person in a long distance relationship. Some people had a girlfriend who lives in Canada, I had the Palace Theater calling out to me from Elmwood. 

My son Eddie is older now, and (thanks in no small part to my influence) he’s grown to enjoy going to the movies. He sees it as a special treat, and it’s been grand to have him reach a point where he specifically asks to see certain movies in a theater. This year we’ve taken him to see The SpongeBob Movie: Search For SquarePants, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Toy Story 5 and Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie, and every one of them was his pick. I would not necessarily have chosen all of these, but I love taking HIM, so I went regardless. We also brought him with us to see movies WE wanted to see that we thought he might enjoy: Supergirl, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Coyote Vs. Acme. His mom and I even got a rare childless movie experience to see Project Hail Mary when his spring break ended a day before mine, and I think he was a little offended when he learned we went to a movie without him, because he still brings it up.

This weekend it’s going to be a little different. We’re going to see the first episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Rifftrax Experiments. This reboot of the classic franchise by some of the people who’ve been doing it for decades was announced earlier this year and, when they revealed that the first episode would be given a Fathom Events theatrical screening, I asked Eddie if he wanted to go. He’s grown up watching MST3K and Rifftrax with us, so I’m not surprised he was into it. Some of the jokes will go over his head, I know, but the jokes are so rapid-fire and diverse that EVERYBODY feels at least ONE of them whiz above their head. He will enjoy the robots and the guy in the monkey costume, and all will be right with the world.

I think this is the way forward for movie theaters. The world has become so fragmented and content has become so diluted and spread out across so many platforms that there HAS to be something unique to convince a younger audience to go to a theater. Sure, lower ticket prices and lower concession prices would be great as well, but it’s also important to give people something they can’t get watching a movie even on a fancy home theater, let alone on a device that will interrupt the film every time Stacy sends a text asking if you saw the newest TikTok. In the case of The Rifftrax Experiments, the draw is getting to see the movie in a room full of like-minded fans, people who love the same thing that you do and who have come out to support it with you. 

That’s a great feeling, but more can be done to get people into theaters. Selling theater-exclusive merchandise like popcorn buckets and doing giveaways of exclusive comic books has been a bit of a draw. So have screenings with exclusive content like interviews with the creators or making-of features, the kind of thing that we used to get as DVD content before the companies gave up on it. Next week there will be a 40th anniversary screening of the original Transformers: The Movie that will be accompanied by a new short featuring what sadly shall be the final performance of the late Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime. If you’ve ever wanted to see a theater full of nerds weeping over a robot, here’s your chance. 

These kinds of retrospective screenings can be a lot of fun. A couple of years ago, Fathom Events did a special presentation of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window, which my wife took me to as a birthday present. It’s a movie I’ve seen a half-dozen times, but never before on the big screen, and that made it worth getting a babysitter and heading out on a Sunday night. Family movies can do this too, of course. When I was growing up, Disney would routinely rerelease their classic movies like Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland to theaters, and as a result kids got to see movies that were decades older than them on the big screen. Rereleases still happen, but on a much smaller scale and for a more limited time. Perhaps it’s time to widen those releases again.

Making the screening itself an event is also something that’s shown success. There are special events where a live orchestra will play the score alongside movies like Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Home Alone – honestly, any movie scored by John Williams will work here. Theaters that serve full food menus beyond just popcorn and candy have had success by pairing up special dinners with movies, serving the same food as (or food inspired by) films like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Ratatouille. 

These are all fun, crowd-pleasing events, but I think we can go even farther. Holiday events, for example, could be really appealing. Every year TBS scores big with its “24 Hours of A Christmas Story.” Can you imagine doing that in a theater? Show the movie on a loop for 24 hours, let people wear pajamas and bring blankets, have a 20-minute intermission between each screening so people can get more food or go to the bathroom. You would sell out a theater in MINUTES. Or how about a screening of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with a full Thanksgiving dinner? What if there was an October screening of John Carpenter’s Halloween where each on-screen death was accompanied by someone in costume lumbering into the theater and “killing” an audience member? Granted, that last one might not be fun for a Paw Patrol audience, but the RIGHT audience would eat it up like the popcorn they’d spill when getting fake stabbed. 

The point I’m getting at is that if we want audiences to come back to the theaters, the theaters are going to have to get creative. Earlier this year, Ryan Gosling got a lot of attention when he said to moviegoers “It’s not your job to keep [theaters] open, it’s our job to make things that make it worth you coming out.” He is absolutely right about that, and I think the phenomenal performance of certain movies this year prove that giving the audience what they want will pay off. But that’s only part of the equation. The other part is the theaters themselves giving the audience a reason to watch the movie in their auditoriums instead of on their phone. Because apparently the fact that watching it on the phone is a poor way to do it isn’t reason enough.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok.