My neighborhood has a repertory theater that shows 35mm prints, and the audiences are full of people in their twenties. Not ironically, not as a bit. They go because a scratched print of a 1975 thriller, watched with two hundred strangers who gasp at the same twist, is simply a better night than anything an algorithm served them that week. The obituary writers keep looking at the multiplex chains and declaring the patient dead, while the small rooms with character are quietly thriving. Maybe the future isn't fewer theaters. Maybe it's fewer bad theaters, and the good ones were never in trouble.
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