In the past month, I have written 15 articles about American professional football. That fact may not be of interest to readers of a movie blog – especially an international one like Curnblog whose readers probably think American football is the equivalent of Tom Hooper’s Cats, overblown and silly, spectacle over substance, with the odd audaciously eye-opening moment scattered about. I only mention it because in that same time, I have not written a single word about cinema.

Not … One … Word.

I have spent a good part of my life going to, lecturing on, and writing about movies. But not now. Not during the lockdown that is still going on in my part of the USA. And even more alarming – I have not watched a new movie since the lockdown took effect.

That is in part because there are precious few new movies to watch. They exist, but they tend not to be very good. I am still trying to understand Netflix’s logic in delaying the release of The Lovebirds until late May. It was scheduled to open in early April, and had received a big build-up. I was desperate to see it in the early days of our lockdown. But it did not show up. And quite frankly, at this point, I don’t really care very much. I’m not saying I won’t watch it when it does appear, but I am not nearly as eager as I was. Why any exhibitor with new material in its pocket would wait right now baffles me. The public reaction to Tiger King should have taught everyone to get new material out there.  The public has a tremendous thirst.

What I wonder – and worry – about is whether that thirst will last. I’m not the best case to go by. My schedule allows me to go to a movie theater and see a new movie almost every single day. On average, I see 6-8 new movies in a theater per week. I love going to the theater. And when I come home, I may watch another older movie or two – something rare I have never seen before, or perhaps an old favorite that I am preparing to write or speak about.

The last movie I saw in a theater was The Hunt, and I wrote about it right here. It was the last movie I wrote about. I was the last person to leave my 20-screen Regal multiplex on the day it shut down. It was a bizarre experience. The theater had already technically closed, but my screening of The Hunt, at which I was the only patron, had gone on after the official close time. When I walked out of the theater, the cavernous hallways were empty. Ropes guided you directly to the exit, sealing off concessions and games, and the big area people would congregate on a busy Friday night. There was one employee – someone I knew – at the exit to wave good-bye. It was a ghost town.

No one knows what the future of movies will be. I am writing now of exhibition, but even production is threatened. The only things comparable to this in my experience were the occasional Writers Guild strikes that used to come along with some frequency. The last one was about 13 years ago. A prolonged writers strike has serious implications for production, but it doesn’t shut down an entire industry. Most production companies have a backlog of screenplays that they can pull off the shelf if they need to crank out some product. But in the era of pandemic, having a screenplay does not matter. You simply cannot go into production – at least not without a radical rewriting of traditional norms.

But I admit I am thinking more of exhibition now. Because the truly distressing thing for me is not that I have not been able to see a new movie in over a month. It’s that I haven’t even wanted to watch an old one at home. I love going to a theater and seeing something new, and I really believe it is that experience that gets me hooked – makes me want to watch more and more movies, regardless of the venue.

“There is only one excuse for having to go through, and force others to go through, the hell that is the creative process of film. The carnal pleasure of that split second in the cinemas, when the projector and the loudspeakers, in unison, allow the illusion of sound and motion to burst forth, like an electron abandoning its orbit to generate light, and create the ultimate: a miraculous surge of life.”

Say what you want about Lars von Trier, who wrote the above in 1991. But no one has captured the feeling I get when a movie springs to life in a theater so well. I get that – in a theater. I do not get it at home. I worry that the Covid-19 pandemic will change film exhibition, a model that many thought was already antiquated in an era of personal screens and mobile miracles. Maybe society at large will fall out of love with the theatrical experience.

The very existence of moving pictures has been threatened many times in its brief history. There was radio in the ‘20s, television in the ‘50s, home video in the ‘80s, and streaming services in the 21^st century. Theatrical exhibition of movies has been battered, but it has found ways to survive them all.

Those were all technological challenges, and movies are created by both artists and technicians. I worry it will not overcome a virus. Movies will survive. But the movie experience that I fell in love with and have been sustained by for more than fifty years – that may not. No one knows what the removal of that larger-than-life communal experience will mean for the future of film, and for the future generations of film fans.

Funny thing is, I didn’t even like The Hunt. But I would dearly love to take my seat in a theater and watch it again today. I hope when I eventually do get that chance, I, and many others like me, will still have that passion.