Steven Spielberg on why the return of movie theaters is so important

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

For many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that it's been quite some time since we last set foot in a theater, and with so many theater chains and smaller outfits in serious financial trouble, it's likely that there will be far fewer theaters when things get back to some degree of normality. In a letter written for Empire, Steven Spielberg wrote passionately about why he thinks that movie theaters will return and why he believes they're so important to our society, especially in the current climate.

In the current health crisis, where movie theatres are shuttered or attendance is drastically limited because of the global pandemic, I still have hope bordering on certainty that when it’s safe, audiences will go back to the movies. I’ve always devoted myself to our movie-going community — movie-going, as in leaving our homes to go to a theatre, and community, meaning a feeling of fellowship with others who have left their homes and are seated with us. In a movie theatre, you watch movies with the significant others in your life, but also in the company of strangers. That’s the magic we experience when we go out to see a movie or a play or a concert or a comedy act. We don’t know who all these people are sitting around us, but when the experience makes us laugh or cry or cheer or contemplate, and then when the lights come up and we leave our seats, the people with whom we head out into the real world don’t feel like complete strangers anymore.

"We’ve become a community, alike in heart and spirit, or at any rate alike in having shared for a couple of hours a powerful experience," Spielberg continued. "That brief interval in a theatre doesn’t erase the many things that divide us: race or class or belief or gender or politics. But our country and our world feel less divided, less fractured, after a congregation of strangers have laughed, cried, jumped out their seats together, all at the same time. Art asks us to be aware of the particular and the universal, both at once. And that’s why, of all the things that have the potential to unite us, none is more powerful than the communal experience of the arts." The theatrical experience really is unlike anything else, and although my personal preference is to watch movies in my own home, I can admit that nothing quite beats watching a truly excellent movie (or even a terrible one) with a passionate crowd.