You Must Remember This…

You must remember this…

The flickering light scorching the darkness. The velvet reclining seats. The smell of popcorn, the soft chuckles, the sensual electricity of sharing something emotional with a randomly assorted room of strangers. Remember it, because cinema is at a checkmate that could prove fatal.

Most people don’t seem to grasp the true scale of the catastrophe. Studios have collapsed before, merged, been swallowed whole, weathering storms that once threatened to turn the silver screen to ash. But this, this is different. Warner Bros, already limping under David Zaslav’s disastrous, profit-first leadership, has now been handed to Netflix. And Netflix winning the sellout bid is not a twist: it is the catastrophic worst-case scenario. Its nefarious da-dum echoes the final nail in the coffin.

Ted Sarandos isn’t even pretending, and has clearly outlined his egotistical, self-serving plan. He calls cinema “outdated.” He praises the idea of watching Lawrence of Arabia on a phone. He mocks the collective experience. He champions loneliness and individuality as the future of the medium. And he does so terrifyingly openly, almost gleefully, like a man sawing off the branch on which he sits.

Look, I’m not saying cinema will die. Cinematheques, arthouses, and independent screens will still glow with the faithful. Casablanca will always play somewhere, on some screen, to someone falling in love with movies for the first time. But cinema as we know it- the wide-release, the sacred space, thousand hearts beating together in the dark- that is what stands on the brink of extinction. New movies will no longer be made for the shared, luminous temple of the big screen. They will be engineered as “content”: optimised, compressed, disposable. Theatres will become financially unsustainable, and filmmaking will be retooled for convenience, not transcendence. And the magic will be lost.

And here is the darker truth. If this continues, cinemas will become relics, museums of their former glory. And worse still, the art form itself will collapse into a mere historical curiosity, a cultural phenomenon of the past. How bizarre our 20th century ancestors must have been, gathering in vast rooms to watch glowing images together. It will seem as quaint, as strange, as an encyclopaedia on a shelf, as bloodletting, as arranged marriages. Cinema will be framed in glass, labelled and categorised, keepsake of a time when human beings sought communion through dreams projected on a wall. Like the zoo. Or the circus. A folk memory of who we used to be.

Cinema made us dream together. It taught us empathy, awe, terror, joy. It gave us heroes, villains, lovers, and every shade of humanity reflected back at us, fifty feet tall. Because cinema is not outdated. Cinema is our shared mythology.

Sarandos may call the big screen obsolete, but he is wrong, blinded by the tyranny of convenience. He cannot measure the irreplaceable uplift of a roomful of strangers laughing, gasping, weeping in unison. He cannot algorithmically replicate the ritual of queuing, choosing the best seat, waiting for the hush before the opening frame.

And this is exactly why we need movies. Because in a film, this awful deal would be stopped by the time the final reel kicks in. The CEO villains would get their richly earned comeuppance, the orchestra would swell, and the projector would whirr back to life just before the credits roll.

But this isn’t a movie. The happily-ever-after applies to the suits’ bank accounts only and, this time, corporate greed gets the close-up.

And so I write this not just as a warning, but as a plea: you must remember this, why film exhibition matters. Fight for it. Support the theatres that remain. Keep the ritual alive. Because once the doors close, once the projectors go cold, once the communal heartbeat stops, there is no algorithm that can bring it back.

Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros is NOT the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

“That’s all, folks!”