Justin: New technology isn’t enough to lure me back to the movie theater

I venture out at least four times a week to catch a play, check out a new comedian, see a concert or have a meal. But you practically have to drag me by the nose hairs to get me to a movie theater — and promise free popcorn.

I‘m not alone. Domestic box-office sales for 2024 were $8.7 billion. According to Comscore, that’s a nearly 24% drop from five years ago. And 2025 isn’t off to a stellar start. Numbers are down 7% compared with the first three months of last year.

“What does that say? What is the consumer trying to tell us?” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos said during the Time100 Summit last month. “That they’d like to watch movies at home, thank you.”

Sarandos, whose frank comments were reported by the Variety trade magazine, also addressed filmmakers who are stuck in the past.

“Folks grew up thinking, ‘I want to make movies on a gigantic screen and have strangers watch them play in the theaters for two months,” he said. “... It’s an outdated concept.”

Movie theaters have heard the death knell before. TV was supposed to kill them off. Then, DVDs and streaming. The industry’s strongest response in the past was to churn out stories so compelling, so magnificent, that you just had to see them on the biggest screens possible.

But the response this time around is focused more on setting and substance.

Theaters seem to think heated seats, three-story-high screens and liquor licenses will make up for the fact that Hollywood has almost given up on epic films that don’t feature wisecracking superheroes. Or Tom Cruise.

One of the most popular new lures is ScreenX, technology that gives viewers a 270-degree panoramic view. For certain scenes, the action spills over from the main screen, projecting images on the left and right walls that would normally be left on the cutting-room floor.

“It’s 3D without the glasses,” “Godzilla vs. Kong” director Adam Wingard says in a promotional video.

Ben Reiners fought to bring the technology to Shakopee’s Marcus Southbridge Crossing Cinema, where he has served as general manager since it opened in 2017.

‘It’s just something different," Reiners said last Wednesday, the day before making ScreenX available to his patrons. “It’s something you can’t get at home. It can’t be duplicated.”

Marcus Theatres, the fourth-largest theater owner in the United States, is so gung-ho on the technology that it also installed it last week in suburban Chicago and Columbus, Ohio.

Pamela Henson, director of marketing and communications for Milwaukee-based Marcus, said the technology works best when it enhances, rather than distracts, from the main story.

She’s still swooning from how well ScreenX worked for the opening sequence in “Top Gun: Maverick” in which we watch fighter planes take off and land. But the innovation was missing from the 2022 blockbuster’s more intimate moments.

“You don’t want to see it when Tom Cruise is sitting with a crying Val Kilmer,” said Henson, who also puts the concert scenes from ”Bohemian Rhapsody" among her all-time favorite ScreenX moments. “Filmmakers don’t want to take away from the context.”

But ScreenX can be a nuisance in other moments.

While watching a matinee screening of “Sinners” at the Mall of America’s B&B Theatres, the only other Minnesota venue with the technology, I kept wondering why I had forked over an extra $7 to see bonus footage of cotton fields and extras milling around a railroad station. It was the equivalent of being served filet mignon with Spam as a side dish.

It also didn’t help that the side images, used for about 30 minutes of the otherwise excellent film, were being projected over brightly lit exit signs and fire alarms.

The Southbridge Crossing theater has fewer distractions — the exit signs are much lower — but the only times I really marveled at the action to my left and right during a screening of “Thunderbolts*” was when the camera panned over shots of Utah mountains and the New York skyline. It did nothing to enhance the action scenes.

Maybe ScreenX will be more effective when applied to other films later this year. I’m curious to see if it’ll help me feel like I’m behind the steering wheel in the Brad Pitt vehicle “F1″ due in theaters next month or if I’ll get a chill from being surrounded by flying monkeys in “Wicked: For Good,” which hits theaters in November. I’m also intrigued to see how ScreenX works with concert films.

Both Henson and Reiners are convinced that the live-action version of “How to Train Your Dragon” due out next month will be a game-changer.

But if Hollywood wants to guarantee that I’ll fork over $20 for a ticket and $5 for a soda, they’ll finance more sweeping films like “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Reds” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” epics that don’t rely on last-minute gimmicks to draw a crowd.

Until then, I’ll keep feeding my film habit from the living room couch.