Streaming has given us convenience, choice, and comfort. It has not given us cinema. Here is why the darkened room, the shared silence, and the overwhelming screen remain irreplaceable — and why going to the pictures is one of the great pleasures left in modern life.
Every few years, someone announces that cinema is dying. In the 1950s it was television. In the 1980s it was the VHS. In the 2000s it was the DVD. And now, in the age of Netflix, Disney+, and on-demand everything, the obituary is being written again. They are wrong again.
The Physics of the Big Screen
There is a reason cinematographers spend entire careers mastering the grammar of widescreen composition. The aspect ratios, the depth of field, the way a wide shot breathes across 20 metres of screen — these are decisions made for a specific canvas. Watching Lawrence of Arabia on a laptop is not watching Lawrence of Arabia. It is watching a reduced, flattened approximation of it. The same is true of every film that takes the full dimensions of cinema seriously, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Oppenheimer.
Sound as a Physical Experience
A properly calibrated cinema sound system does not just play audio — it occupies space. The bass frequencies of a Hans Zimmer score are felt in the chest before they are heard by the ear. The directional audio of a suspense sequence, where a sound begins at the back left speaker and moves slowly to the front right, creates a spatial anxiety that no domestic soundbar can replicate. Cinema sound is architecture.
The Collective Experience
Something changes in a room of strangers who have agreed, for two hours, to experience the same thing at the same time. Communal laughter is physiologically different from laughing alone. Communal fear is more intense. Communal grief — the kind that settles over a cinema when a film lands its final scene perfectly — is one of the most unexpectedly moving experiences available to us. You cannot manufacture that on a sofa.
The Ritual Matters
The journey to the cinema — the ticket, the darkening lights, the phone going face-down in your pocket — is not incidental to the experience. It is the experience. The friction of going somewhere, of committing to a film for an uninterrupted two hours, is precisely what makes it valuable. Attention is the rarest currency we have. Cinema demands it, and rewards it accordingly.
The Films That Streaming Will Never Commission
Streaming platforms have produced some extraordinary television. They have been far less successful at producing cinema. The incentive structures are different: streaming rewards re-watchable, algorithmically safe content that keeps subscribers on the platform. Cinema rewards risk, ambition, and the single uninterrupted experience. The films that change us — the ones we carry for years — are almost always the ones that took a chance.
How to Be a Better Cinema-Goer
Go alone occasionally. A solo cinema trip is an underrated pleasure — full concentration, no negotiation on what to see, post-film reflection without the need to immediately verbalise it. Seek out independent cinemas. The IFI in Dublin, the QFT in Belfast, the Watershed in Bristol, the BFI Southbank in London — these are cultural institutions as valuable as any gallery or concert hall. And go to see something you know nothing about. The best cinema discoveries are rarely the ones you planned.