Will We Ever Go To The Movies Again... And Does That Matter?
b'That phrase - going to the movies - that shared experience in a movie theater full of strangers already makes me nostalgic, like listening to vinyl records.\\n \\nBefore the pandemic, the movie theater business was an 11-billion dollar industry in the US alone. In 2020, there were approximately 40,000 screens in 5,798 theaters that employed over 115,000 people. \\n \\nThen, of course, in March of 2020, like all communal entertainment experiences, they were all shut down. Netflix, Amazon and Disney, which were already increasing their market share of the movie experience, replaced movie theaters overnight. But as we crawl out of the pandemic to a post-corona world, will the tension build to return to the movies? Right now, we are seeing early signs of a market for the sanctity of the movie theater experience.\\n \\nTo help us understand the history of the film business and where it goes from here, post-corona, John Podhoretz returns to our conversation. He\\u2019s been a prolific film critic for over four decades. John is editor in chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary\\u2019s award-winning daily podcast, he\\u2019s a columnist for the New York Post, a book author, and was film critic for the Weekly Standard and television critic for the New York Post. \\n \\n \\nAre movies as we\\u2019ve watched them for the past century \\u2014 over? Were movie theaters already in decline and the pandemic simply accelerated the race to the inevitable? Or are we itching to get back out\\u2026 to go to movies?'