Around the dawn of the motion picture age, movies were a grand social spectacle. In the 1920’s many theater owners built lavishly decorated “movie palaces” replete with grand entrances and luxurious seating to attract customers. Watching the film was a unique experience too. Theaters frequently hired musicians or even whole orchestras to score the right mood for their audience. Before television, many theater-goers came to movie theaters to watch the latest news reels, reveling in the shared experience of current events with their fellow patrons.
Enter 2007. While the grand spectacle of the movie lives on for some patrons, for many others, the movie-going experience has been commodified by the digital age. High ticket prices have driven many consumers away, while technology has stepped in to fill the gaps. Viewing movies has become a solitary experience, queued up on DVD’s, stored on personal video players, or streamed on YouTube in tiny bits. But the desire for the collective experience of the movie house remains. Recent movies like The Simpsons Movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Snakes on a Plane indicate a revival of the social experience of movie theaters from the days of old. Rather than passively consume movie content, younger viewers are actively participating in the movie-watching experience – dressing in costumes, bringing themed food and engaging with the movies, their characters, and stories like never before.
The most notable example was last summer’s Snakes on a Plane, which saw many patrons bring fake rubber snakes and elaborate costumes to showings. Blogger Ross White provides us with some tips for a proper SoaP-watching experience. Couple this with the experience of summer 2007, which saw the release of the highly anticipated Harry Potter and Simpsons movies. NGT blogged recently about the premiere of the new Harry Potter film. For The Simpsons Movie premiere, many fans took a queue from Homer sneaking in their own doughnuts and 7-11 buzz cola to showings.
Is all this merely an outpouring of movie fandom? Not exactly. As more and more content lives online and on hard drives, young consumers are increasingly hungry for the power of shared experiences. Movies are a source of common ground, much more so than other media, like TV or music, where niche-based subcultures prevent collaboration on the same scale. (There’s just a lot less to choose from–and that can be a good thing.) After all, as humans, we still crave offline experiences and face-to-face interactions. Theaters should take a cue from the enhanced experiences customers are creating for themselves (3D films are the next big thing…again). The future will show more customized experiences and more interaction with our media–and hopefully with our friends as well.
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1 » Movies become social events // Aug 23, 2007 at 9:40 am
[...] Original post by NGT [...]
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