Quote:
Originally Posted by troutman
Film Festivals are full of quality art films, if summer block-busters aren't your thing.
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Absolutely, but they always have been. What used to be the case was that from these myriad film-festival-bait movies, a few real standouts with more than just arthouse appeal would get a good amount of word of mouth behind them and everyone would go and see them. Or you'd get that type of movie made outside of that small-budget context, and it'd have all sorts of hype behind it. I'm thinking about movies like Lost In Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, No Country for Old Men, Children of Men, The Wrestler, A History of Violence etc etc etc. There were lots of those films that got a ton of buzz in the 2000s, such that you went to see them in theatre. Not so much in the 2010s.
I do wonder if it's partly a product of home theatres getting to a point where the experience of watching on your couch, for anything less spectacular than an Avengers movie, is so good that you don't want to bother with leaving your house and paying to see it in a theatre. For me, that's unfortunate. Seeing some of the above movies in theatre (Memento comes to mind specifically) was a fantastic and memorable experience for me, far more so than seeing, say, Black Panther in Imax.