Name: Why You Should Go To The Movie Theater
Uploaded: 2026-01-26T17:15:12.000Z
Duration: 7 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

By now, everybody can see that the pandemic accelerated some worrying trends in the movie industry.

Adverbs of manner

Namely, that increasingly the only films that actually get exhibited on a big screen are tentpoles, blockbusters, sometimes called event movies.

Basic passive voice

While independent and mid budget movies are increasingly relegated to streaming services, watched by people in their homes on their TVs.

This change has been a long time coming, and it's not total.

You can still find indies or Oscar movies or the occasional rom com at a local cinema, usually a specialty or independent cinema.

But it's harder than ever to catch a non blockbuster at your nearest multiplex.

And for many, these corporate theater chains are the only big screens within reach with so much great content available on your tv.

Where you can watch in Mac comfort without the need to put real clothes on.

Or risk having a giant sit in front of you or withstand the rage inducing noise of people chit chatting during a movie or chewing popcorn open mouthed at a volume you never thought possible.

Many people, I think, have begun to deem the movie theater worth it only when the film requires a giant screen to be appreciated.

When the bigness, the booming surround sound is essential to the experience.

The pandemic only made that calculation more stark.

With COVID you weren't only risking a popcorn muncher assaulting your ears, but your health.

What kind of movie is worth a risk like that?

Especially when a lot of these movies were premiering on streaming the same day as theatrical release.

Now it looks like the day and date releases have come to an end.

But the pandemic reinforced a mindset that was already finding purchase among moviegoers.

And that mindset, I think will persist beyond Covid if that ever happens.

But there's an assumption here that I think is worth scrutinizing.

We all implicitly understand what's meant by the term big movies.

When I say movies that require a big screen to be appreciated, there's probably a certain kind of film that pops into your head.

And these days superheroes dominate action movies.

In the domestic box office for 2021, the top 13 movies were action movies.

And yes, I'm putting A Quiet Place, Part two in that category.

The top four movies were superhero movies, with number one being, of course, no Way Home.

Spider man moviegoers believed was worth it.

And as one of those moviegoers, I can tell you it was.

But is action the only thing made better by a large screen are explosions and guns and superpowers?

The only things a 30 foot tall projection can make more immersive.

I was thinking about this question and then I watched the Hollywood Reporter's annual directors roundtable and Kenneth Branagh said this.

The other thing that I think, and these films will do it is you get the.

You know, just seeing in close, close ups of faces, massive close ups of faces in the cinema, that makes me feel different about the human condition.

And this in turn made me reflect on what was possibly my favorite performance of 2021.

You come here trying to be all pretty for me, but really you remind me I'm a dog.

I'm an English pit bulldog with sex appeal and a very Jewish nose.

That's Harriet Sansom Harris in a movie, stealing one scene cameo in Paul Thomas Anderson's Licorice Pizza Harris.

And it's at this point in the video when I realize it's futility, because you're probably watching this on your laptop or your phone and on screens of that size, you can't possibly capture the subtleties of Harris's demented performance in this extreme close up.

All the twitches and adjustments, the unhinged intensity.

But in the theater where I saw this, the effect was overwhelming.

The audience was wrapped by this giant, crazed face.

Massive faces emoting on massive screens is as epic, if not more epic, than explosions and battles.

Action can be compelling, but only in as much as it serves a story.

And stories are fundamentally about people and people.

People reveal themselves through their faces.

The face is where the most important, most impactful, most intense parts of a story occur, in dramatic outpourings of emotion or the tiniest micro expression.

And the chance to see these small, momentous events on a big screen should be as much of a draw as any action set piece.

It even sees faces in places where they aren't.

We are constantly and involuntarily reading the faces we meet, trying to understand what the person behind it is feeling.

In the movie theater, we get the rare opportunity to see faces with more detail than at any other time in our daily life.

We see things there that can't even be seen in person, let alone on a tv, computer or phone.

I think the worrying trends, the pandemic accelerated will be hard to reverse going forward.

I imagine we're going to see fewer movies at a theater than we used to.

But maybe our idea of what a big movie is can change.

Maybe when we say you need to see this on the big screen.

It won't be because the action was so energetic and explosive, but

because stories were told on the faces that are impossible to see in your living room.

Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode was brought to you by Squarespace.

If you don't know you can use Squarespace to make beautiful websites for anything.

You might need a personal site, a wedding website site for your business or portfolio, and

in just a few clicks you can have that website up and running.

Their design team has crafted beautiful templates that work on computer browsers and on mobile, switching perfectly between the two.

You can integrate your own photos and videos with just a few clicks, and

you can even link your social accounts all from within Squarespace.

So you can auto post to Twitter and Facebook.

Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and

when you're ready to launch that site, go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase.