For entirely guessable reasons, on Saturday night every cinema I would regularly, willingly set foot in was booked solid. I nearly got two tickets in my local, but the seats were as far away from each other as it was possible to be, which my 13-year-old was fine with, except one of them was wheelchair-accessible. The cinema, it appeared, was fine with me booking that, but it struck me as the kind of thing Larry David would do in Curb Your Enthusiasm.
So we ended up in a cinema on top of a shopping centre, miles from anywhere, a place where everything smells of the weird doughnut-pretzel-hybrid stall in the ambitiously titled atrium, and everyone has accidentally bought a fitness item they’ll never use in Decathlon. The last time I was here, it was to see Hotel Rwanda with my mum, which throws me back a bit, because that was released nearly 20 years ago, and she hasn’t been out of her house for five of them. When we came out, she said “what an appalling place”, and I thought she was referring to the atrocities we had just seen on screen , but she actually meant the shopping centre.
OK, it doesn’t matter what we saw (suffice it to say, the thing we’d forgotten to wear was a pink ra-ra skirt, not a black suit); all that matters is that cinema is back. This has been the largest weekend for ticket sales in four years. Not since Avengers: Endgame have so many people all wanted to see the same thing(s) at once. But that doesn’t tell the whole resurgence story.
The Vue cinema chain reported that a fifth of its customers at the weekend did the whole five-hour Barbenheimer marathon. My own careful data analysis reveals that absolutely everyone apart from two idiots got the memo about a dress code, and treated these cinema visits with the same carefully observed ritualism and carnivalesque spirit that they might bring to Halloween or Cinco de Mayo. Sure, the Marvel universe can enliven a kind of dutiful mass attendance, but the two releases last weekend unleashed something else altogether, a solid principle straight (almost) from the mouth of Kevin Costner: if you make the films, people will come to the films. That’s all that was missing, in the quiet years; films.
When streaming took off, it was all pretty sudden, the idea of the story that takes 40 hours to tell – and we instantly got used to it. You can say some pretty complicated things in that much time. You can really get to know a person. How many of your best friends have you spent as long concentrating on, over the past few years, as you have Walter White? (Don’t be silly: it’s none.) How much of the human condition can be mediated through the metaphor of a vampire? (All of it.) You can also say the same thing, over and over again (torture is bad, but terrorists, also bad) and that can be highly enjoyable, too (cheers, 24).
Over time, the expanse of hours became a requirement, and nothing was worth making unless it would stretch to six seasons. Cinema became the short story of the screen genre; the thing you dipped into when you didn’t really have time to commit. Adults stopped going to the pictures altogether, I guess because we’re all lazy and greedy. By the end of the 00s, as if by magic (market forces), all the blockbuster films seemed to be for kids – the first Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Finding Nemo, Shrek, Star Wars Episode III, Pirates of the Caribbean. We talked a lot about the coarsening of the dialogue – why it was that women, in particular, seemed to get much better lines and more complexity in the 1940s than in the supposedly enlightened 2010s. It got to the point where if a heroine had a character at all, that counted as “art-house”.
Can two big films turn the tide? I don’t know, but it establishes a principle: you can still say quite a lot in two hours, and, not necessarily, but yes, in this instance, even more in three.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.
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