The Death of a Cinema

Is there any way back for the common or garden British high street cinema?

A couple of weeks ago I was walking along the Fulham Road, a thoroughfare in a chi-chi part of London. I had, several years earlier, worked at a bookshop on the road. In the intervening years the bookshop had closed and been replaced, first, with an enormous branch of EasyJet’s money loaning service (a strange fit for the area). Now, however, the site was occupied by a vast auction house, selling vases and armoires for the cost of a new car.

On the corner next to where the bookshop used to be is one of London’s best cinemas. The cinema on the Fulham Road has a distinctive art deco façade, and has, for the past 94 years, been a key part of the West London arts scene. Before, after, and during my stint as a local bookseller, I was a regular at that cinema. I spent my 18^th birthday there, watching Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. I was there for a screening of Todd Haynes’ Carol where a rat ran loose amongst the audience, and we were semi-evacuated. I was there for one of the lowest moments of my solo-cinema attending life: watching Fifty Shades of Grey at the ‘strange men matinee’ showing.

I won’t bury the lede too much more: the cinema has just closed, seemingly forever. During my time going there, it was operated by Cineworld, the UK’s biggest cinema chain. Several years ago, Cineworld acquired Picturehouse – a more upmarket variant that had started in Oxford in 1989 – and, a couple of years after that deal, converted the Fulham Road cinema from a Cineworld to a Picturehouse. It made sense: Picturehouse offers a slightly more luxurious experience at a slightly higher price point. And this is one of Zoopla’s most notoriously monied postcodes.

The news of the cinema closing on Fulham Road came in the same week that Cineworld – a company that has been in administration since July 2023 – announced the closure of several more branches. Glasgow, Bedford, Hinckley, Loughborough, Yate and Swindon will all lose their cinemas as part of this latest restructure, while the firm is said to be considering closing 25% of its 100 remaining UK locations over the course of this year. Odeon, its nearest rival, has this week closed its Covent Garden (where I spent many an hour in its notoriously sticky seats) and Surrey Quays branches. The Covent Garden site, formerly the Saville Theatre, has been operated as a cinema for more than half a century.

The British cinema industry isn’t just in trouble – it’s dying. Pubs are in trouble, bookshops are in trouble, newsagents are in trouble (only Turkish barbers, vape shops and CBD dispensaries seem exempt from the concern) but cinemas are in terminal decline. If a posh cinema in a leafy part of well-heeled West London isn’t exempt from these currents, nowhere is.

The loss of a functioning theatrical distribution industry does have knock-on effects. More and more, studios have become reliant on co-financing deals with the big streaming platforms: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc. This has allowed the cost of the films being made to stay relatively steady, despite declining box office receipts. Of the 20 most expensive films ever made, seven (Fast X, Doctor Strange 2, Avatar 2, Indiana Jones 5, Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Jurassic World Dominion) were released in the last five years (the post-covid period). Those films make quite a stark point: they’re all produced by Universal, Paramount or Disney. Through all the turbulence of the film industry over the past decade (and for all their internal travails – see the current Paramount situation for further details) they have remained proper, old-school spendthrift movie studios.

But since covid the opposite has been happening amongst streamers (and here Disney must be excluded, as their tentpole movie strategy is still very much theatrical first). Covid subscriber numbers hit such historic highs that the next few years have been an exercise in expectation management. The loss of subscribers from these pandemic-fuelled peaks has caused a commensurate loss of shareholder confidence. And, generally speaking, these streaming companies have not been profitable ventures, instead making money for their investors off the back of the share price. So, like almost all of Big Tech, something has had to give.

We are still at a point in the cycle where the full ramifications of budgetary recalibrations aren’t being felt by consumers. We are also still at the point in the cycle where the impacts of the SAG and WGA strike last year – which has thrown numerous productions into disarray, and scuppered many others – hasn’t been felt. But it will be. 2025 and 2026 are shaping up to be barren years for cinemas, from a content perspective.

The decomposition of the British cinema industry, in part, reflects that lack of confidence in a “bounce back”. The brief Barbenheimer spike has been succeeded by a rough year at the Box Office, with little short-to-medium term prospect of change. The migration of conventional consumers from cinema patrons to home viewers is unlikely to be arrested. Where streaming giants have utilised brief theatrical windows (with many of their prestige releases, for example) it has usually served three purposes: make some extra cash, get a huge amount of marketing off reviews and features, and qualify for various industry awards (also, really, a marketing exercise). The fact remains that these streamers are still, basically, in competition with theatrical distribution – and tighter budgets and more closely watched bottom lines are unlikely to change that.

The other impact of the elision of film and streaming has been the gazumping of film, by TV, in the eyes of most consumers. Look, I’m a professional TV critic, so I am obviously part of the establishment who is pushing this narrative. But it’s clear that the big cultural moments happening in the audio-visual medium are happening on TV right now. And, equally, there’s little to stop films being consumed essentially as TV at home – crudely split into multiple instalments, rather than watched in one long go. If millennials and Gen Z represent frayed attention generations, then the market seems willing to provide them (/us) with exactly what their (/our) fractured brains demand.

With this all happening, the studios’ strategy seems to read: franchise, franchise, franchise. Fewer screens mean – from a theatrical release perspective – fewer movies getting a wide viewership. Which means you need to focus on bums on seats. What movies are people going to leave the house for? What are they going to spend £15 for a ticket on? Or another £20 at the concessions stand? The answer, for Disney, is Marvel. For Universal, it’s Mission Impossible and Fast & Furious. But for everyone else?

And the further problem is that nobody has squared the circle of streamers’ involvement in all this. Paramount’s streaming platform – Paramount Plus – has been a disaster, but if the acquisition/merger with Skydance happens, then that media bloc will likely try and compete in the streaming game. (Top Gun: Maverick, it should be noted, was a huge theatrical success for Paramount, but its swift appearance on Paramount Plus did little for the platform – executives are likely to see this as a lesson in the impossibility of cake ownership and consumption). All this will continue the strangulation of cinemas.

I felt a strange despair at the sight of the marquee above the Fulham Road cinema. “Thank you for ninety-four years of movie memories,” it proclaimed, sadly. Back in 1930, when the cinema opened, the talky era had only just begun. The Jazz Singer had been released in 1927 and a new age was beginning, where cinema would become the predominant recreational cultural pursuit. For half a century, cinema’s artistic hegemony would be – largely – uninterrupted. But now, as the doors close on this venue, that era not only feels like it has lost its primacy, but as though it is headed for the history books.

They say that mediums don’t die, they just rearrange. Books may look very different now from how they did in the days of St Bede, but they still exist. Write them off, they just keep coming. So too for radio, music, theatre, TV, magazines, video games, whatever. They evolve, but they don’t disappear. Try and think of a cultural medium that has actually gone bust – chances are, you can’t. But theatrically released films face a real challenge, as they exist at the intersection of two struggling industries: the arts, and the high street. And while films may still exist, where would you go to buy a DVD in 2024?

Cineworld is in real trouble. Private equity vultures circle the entire Western system of movie theaters. The question we must ask ourselves, socially, is whether cinemas are a cultural asset worth protecting. Here in the UK, movie stars (and Premier League football) have been our predominant source of international soft power for many decades. The erosion of aspiration in an area (possibly the only area) where we’re a world leading exporter, is a dangerous thing.

Access to cinemas is not a human right. But in a world where I could get my hair cut at seven different locations – SEVEN! – between my house and the nearest tube station, the collapse of the high street cinema would be an egregious form of cultural vandalism. But if chains are being priced out of some of the most beautiful, historic cinemas, in the wealthiest part of town, then what hope is there for the future? What hope is there that another generation of British kids will grow up, dreaming of seeing their beautiful faces – huge – on screens around the world?

FWIW if anyone would like to put together a consortium to buy/rent the Fulham Road cinema: I’m in! Email me, nick@podotpods.com.