It was a rainy Sunday and so, with nothing much better to do, I brought Daughter Number Four to the cinema. The film wasn’t great: computer generated imagery–talking animals, occasionally singing mediocre songs. It felt like something put together on a laptop.
We’ve been to the pictures on rainy Sundays many times before. I book the tickets online, though that’s hardly necessary. The place is always close to empty. The website requires you to select your seats, but we never sit in them. We sit in the posh (more expensive) seats at the back. As did the dozen or so other people there.
Cinemas, at least on rainy Sunday afternoons, have a slightly gloomy, dilapidated air. They feel abandoned: built for large crowds that have long since gone elsewhere. The few staff who are there seem to be tasked with selling nachos and pick-and-mix. The film seems additional to all this: just a comfortable place to eat your snacks. I don’t know if it is like this on any other day. Perhaps on a Friday night, it’s packed. But I don’t know. I can’t remember when I last went to a film screening at night.
When I looked it up afterwards, I was unable to find confirmation of that claim – it could be a depends-how-you-count-it figure
Yet before the film started, during the adverts for Leaving Cert courses and budget hotels, a statistic popped up on the screen: the Irish have, per capita, the highest rate of movie attendance in the European Union. When I looked it up afterwards, I was unable to find confirmation of that claim – it could be a depends-how-you-count-it figure – yet movie attendance in Ireland is significant: the second highest in the EU (after France) and the sixth highest in the world. Iceland is number one: which would imply that there is a correlation between ticket sales and the frequency of rainy Sundays.
But all that masks a grimmer set of figures. If Ireland’s multiscreen cinemas feel like they were built for a previous era, that era was nearly 20 years ago. In 2008, we had the second highest attendance rates in the world – again, after Iceland – but in the years afterwards that has declined steadily.
There are probably many reasons for that; none of them to do with an improvement in our weather. The year 2008 was the crash, then in the 2010s, streaming began in earnest: prompting many to reason that paying for a cinema ticket was a waste, given that the same film would pop up on their subscription service six months later. In effect, they’d paid to see it already. Then we had the pandemic, and cinema attendance in Ireland and worldwide has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. There seems to be a consensus that it never will.
The year 2007 was also the start of the Marvel films era: a money-guzzling gargantuan which no doubt made it more difficult for other films to secure an audience
Seeing a film in a cinema is a different experience from seeing it on your couch. There are people around you who will react to what they are seeing. It gives the film a heightened emotional edge. It can, occasionally, turn it into an event. Yet that seems to be a sweetly nostalgic experience now. There was something of that with Barbenheimer in 2023, but nothing else I can think of; not for years.
The year 2007 was also the start of the Marvel films era: a money-guzzling gargantuan which no doubt made it more difficult for other films to secure an audience, while – depressingly – proving that there’s no great need for originality, wit or heart to achieve box office success. So far, 35 films, most of them telling largely the same story. Just with different uniforms.
This doesn’t mean that good films aren’t getting made. And there will always be a cohort of people who prefer to go to a cinema. But that number is shrinking; and so too may the number of cinemas. The collective viewing experience may become a minority pastime, available only in our cities. Leaving most people with nothing to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
