TIFF 2024: For Gen Zs and beyond, cinema is about authentic live experience
While movie premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the future of film is debated in the .
As one might expect nearly of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, . But perhaps more significant have been presenters’ emphases on how AI and other new technologies are shaping audience experience at the movies.
Talk topics at the conference also included “” a session focussed on new projection and audio technologies for cinemas, and .
Amid such discussions, it’s clear that movie theatricals — films screened in physical theatres instead of streaming online — .
To understand this challenge in historical context, Taylor Mackintosh, a 91ɫ Cinema and Media Arts student (BFA 2024), and I examined the history of movie audiences and their attendance in cinemas.
As the film industry competes for viewers’ attention and audiences’ limited leisure dollars amid the looming threat of AI, fan buzz at TIFF as well as the TIFF panel discussions hint at something larger: that cinemas may be returning to earlier history by and at the movies.
Overall ticket sales decline
The successes of hit summer films such as Inside Out 2 or other recent hits like Oppenheimer, Barbie and Top Gun: Maverick, can look like anomalies, as movie ticket sales continue a more than 20-year decline.
Movie ticket sales in North America peaked at , according to Statista, a data gathering and visualization plaftorm.
While there has been , changing viewer habits may be affecting in-person attendance, while industry strikes .
According to Nash Information Services, in 2024, . Overall, .
Gen Z boosts
One encouraging sign is that in 2020, and people from this demographic continue to be cinema’s most habitual moviegoers.
. These audiences access arts and culture first digitally, but they also care about the overall experience, including physical, social and experiential dimensions of events.
A noted that 78 per cent of this demographic consider social media their primary source for finding cultural content. But they often prefer in-person experiences, and they’re willing to pay more if they feel it’s an experience they couldn’t get elsewhere.
Recorded media, live performance
Perhaps it is no surprise that events combining elements of recorded media and live performance experiences have been successful. The (2023) movie became , perhaps in part because movie theatres .
Popular immersive experiences drawing on familiar content in art — like and — similarly capitalize on the hybrid experience of popular media presented as an embodied experience.
Television and movies are exploring this format too. animated favourites in its two-storey projection room and provides interactive projections on the walls and floor. offers guests the chance to interact with actors dressed in period costume amid live music.
Growing immersive, multimedia experiences
Today, popular entertainment is we might call the theatricalization of media.
Take, for example, the Netflix series . The series revisits 1980s popular culture, including visual and narrative references to everything from Indiana Jones to hair bands. Now in production for season five, the streaming series has been offered as and is headed for Broadway as .
Look around and you’ll see the terms “experience” and “immersive” proliferating across media platforms. Along with , the narrative film (2024) was recently billed as “A New M. Night Shyamalan Experience.”
The TED talk by media artist Willie Williams about his collaboration with has been viewed more . By March 2024 U2 sold more than the interactive experience.
As Williams describes it, the technical possibilities of an immersive media venue like create novel artistic opportunities where an audience’s sensory perception is being choreographed by the artist.
Of course, both theatre and cinemas have always attempted to shape the audience’s sensory experience. Sometimes this took the form of novel technologies, such as the and (image maximum) format in 1970.
Embodied experience at the movies
But some of the most effective examples of audience experience in cinema have had little to do with screen technologies. During the Great Depression, struggling popcorn and air-conditioning to encourage attendance by a cash-strapped public.
Popcorn was a relatively cheap but filling snack that eventually became a staple of both the movie-going experience and the business model in North America. that combined with popcorn, newsreels and the escapist entertainment of the films themselves offered an affordable respite during the financial crisis.
Multi-sensory cinematic experiences
Today, we see similar trends in movie-going habits. In a challenging financial context of both technological change and a changing climate, cinemas offer newer attractions and perks such as and , as well as simple in a sweltering summer.
Such trends suggest that the future of cinema may look a lot like its past. Or, in the words of the great film and theatre songwriter, ”
By , dean of the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design and Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, 91ɫ, and Taylor Mackintosh, who completed a 91ɫ BFA in Cinema and Media Arts Production, co-authored this story.
This article is republished from .
