What If Movie Theaters Stopped Waiting for Hollywood?

We covered enough ground that night to fill several articles, and I plan to return to some of it later. This one follows a single thread from that much bigger conversation. It’s about how movies find their way to audiences, and who decides which ones do.

These are some of my favorite conversations because they refuse to stay on topic. They start with one subject and wander until they land somewhere none of us planned to go. This particular thread left me with more questions than answers, which is usually a sign it was worth pulling.

Whatever Happened to Going to the Movies?

The first thing we agreed on was how good television has become. Some of the best writing and acting of the past decade has landed on television and streaming services. For a lot of viewers, the couch has quietly become the default seat. Theatrical movies, by comparison, can feel like a mixed bag.

There are exceptions, and this year handed us a big one. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened in July and crossed the billion-dollar mark worldwide within a few weeks. IMAX screens did a remarkable share of the work. That’s an R-rated, nearly three-hour adaptation of a Greek epic poem. Audiences will still leave the house when someone gives them a reason. No living room can replicate a dark theater full of strangers watching the same giant screen.

Not every movie offers that kind of experience, though. When you can stay home and watch something excellent, buying a ticket becomes a harder sell. Then there is the phone in your pocket. Think about how much entertainment we consume without ever deciding to seek it out. A video appears in the feed, another one follows, and twenty minutes vanish. Most of it costs us nothing beyond our attention and the patience to sit through a few ads. So what does that mean for an industry built on persuading people to put on shoes and buy a ticket?

What If the Theaters Became the Distributors?

At some point the conversation turned to distribution. In the traditional arrangement, studios make or acquire films and then negotiate with theater chains to exhibit them. The theaters sell the tickets, and the two sides split the box office. The terms tend to favor whoever holds the movie everyone wants to see. That’s the simplified version, of course. The real business runs on a dense web of financing and licensing deals. It keeps a lot of entertainment lawyers gainfully employed.

Then someone asked a question that stuck with me: why don’t movie theaters distribute more of their own movies?

Take AMC. It already owns the screens and knows exactly who buys tickets to what. Why couldn’t it operate more like a content platform, acquiring films or even financing productions of its own? Instead of waiting on studios, a theater chain could have a real say in what audiences get to see.

The Eras Tour Experiment

As it turns out, AMC has already tested the idea, and the test went very well. In 2023, Taylor Swift bypassed the studios and struck a deal with AMC to release Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. AMC didn’t keep the film to its own screens, either. Other chains received it through the independent distributor Variance Films. Swift and AMC reportedly kept 57 percent of ticket sales. The film opened to an estimated $92.8 million in the U.S. and Canada, the biggest debut ever for a concert picture. Beyoncé followed that December with a similar deal for Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé.

What I find most interesting is how little traditional marketing the release required. With hundreds of millions of social media followers, Swift hardly needed a studio campaign. The audience already existed.

AMC supplied the screens and Swift supplied the demand. Nobody needed a studio to make the introduction.

None of this means AMC has become a Hollywood studio. A theater chain that steps into distribution still faces the costs of producing and marketing entertainment. Those costs just land on a different desk. Still, it’s a striking example of a company stepping outside its traditional role. It made us wonder what else might be possible.

There Isn’t Just One Way to Distribute a Movie Anymore

The longer we talked, the more apparent it became that distribution has already moved well beyond the old studio-to-theater pipeline. Some films still get a traditional theatrical run before moving to digital rental and streaming. Others go straight to subscription platforms or video on demand. A growing number live on free, ad-supported services that earn their money from commercials.

Then there are the companies building around audience demand. Gathr pioneered what it calls Theatrical on Demand. Fans request a film at a local theater, and the screening happens only if enough people commit to buying tickets. The company says the model has powered more than 600 campaigns. It’s now building a self-serve version that lets filmmakers test demand city by city before renting a theater. Kinema offers independent filmmakers its own tools for organizing community screenings and digital viewings.

These approaches raise a question I keep coming back to. What if a film didn’t need a massive national advertising campaign to find its audience? What if filmmakers could find the communities that care and build distribution around demand they can actually measure?

The Cartoon That Topped the Box Office

The best evidence for that idea arrived this summer from animation, which delights me more than it probably should. The Amazing Digital Circus is an independent web series created by Gooseworx and produced by Glitch Productions. It debuted on YouTube in 2023 and went on to rack up more than a billion views. For the finale, Glitch put the last episode in theaters two weeks before releasing it on YouTube. Glitch partnered with the specialty distributor Fathom Entertainment on a U.S. run that grossed $20.2 million over its first four days. It was the top-grossing film in the country on its opening day, and the global total reached $36.6 million.

Fathom originally planned a four-day engagement and stretched it to two weeks when fans kept buying tickets. Once presales took off, the theater count more than doubled from about 900 locations to over 2,000.

Nobody at a major studio greenlit it, and no national ad campaign told audiences it existed. The fans did that part themselves.

I don’t want to overstate it. One critic made a fair point: if view counts guaranteed box office, every online personality would already own a hit. Plenty of influencer movies have vanished on arrival. But the lesson isn’t that every YouTube channel deserves a theatrical release. It’s that an audience built online can still choose to gather in a theater when the event feels worth it.

Perhaps different kinds of movies need different kinds of distribution. A major action spectacle may need thousands of screens on a single weekend. A small independent drama might do better through community screenings and word of mouth. The possibilities get more interesting once we stop assuming every film has to travel the same road.

Are We Living Through a Paradigm Shift?

This is where the conversation got its most interesting. Technology is changing the business faster than anyone can measure. We talk about artificial intelligence and new distribution platforms as if we know where all of it leads. I’m not convinced we do.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is going through a reset of its own. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery spent much of this year fighting through antitrust challenges in an effort to combine two of the last remaining legacy studios into a single company. Consolidation is one way an industry responds to disruption. The biggest players get bigger and try to control the new channels before anyone else can.

I suspect we’re in the middle of a paradigm shift. What I can’t tell you is how big it will turn out to be. Perhaps this is the beginning of a fundamental restructuring of the entertainment industry. Or perhaps the major studios will absorb the new technologies and keep dominating the business as they have for generations. History offers plenty of examples of established industries absorbing the very technologies that were supposed to topple them. Something else is happening in the meantime, though, and it may matter just as much.

A More Level Playing Field

The playing field, at least in some respects, has become more level.

A filmmaker today can shoot a feature on inexpensive equipment and edit it on a personal computer. Social media can build the audience, and digital platforms can deliver the finished work. That doesn’t mean everyone has an equal shot. Financing and audience discovery remain enormous obstacles, and access to established distribution networks still matters a great deal.

But some of the old barriers have come down. Whenever that happens, new people walk through with new ideas. Some of them will fail. Others may stumble onto business models the established companies never considered. We won’t know which approaches will last until people have had the chance to try them.

What Happens When Technology Changes the Value of Entertainment?

Naturally, we also talked about AI, since nearly every conversation about entertainment ends up there these days. Technology has already changed how movies get made and how audiences find them, and AI could accelerate all of it.

But I wonder whether we’re looking at the question from the wrong end. We spend a great deal of time discussing what technology will let us create. We spend far less asking what people actually want to experience. If producing content becomes cheaper and easier, we’ll almost certainly have more of it competing for our attention. More content doesn’t automatically mean more compelling entertainment, though. It may just mean more noise.

And while technology makes it easier than ever to stay home, that convenience might make certain shared experiences more valuable. A concert or a special screening gets us out of the house and gives us something a phone can’t reproduce. The Eras Tour and The Amazing Digital Circus both behaved less like movies and more like events. Audiences treated them that way. Or perhaps audiences will keep drifting in the opposite direction. I honestly don’t know, and that uncertainty is part of what makes the subject so interesting.

The Conversation Is Only the Beginning

I’ve learned that these conversations rarely end when everyone goes home. That’s usually when the interesting part starts. Someone raises a question or makes an observation that stays with me. Even if I don’t know enough to offer an informed opinion, I find myself turning it over for days. So I start researching the companies involved and the business models they’re testing to understand what’s working and why.

Almost without exception, the research takes me somewhere I didn’t intend to go. I’ll discover a company I’d never heard of. Or I’ll find an industry wrestling with a problem that looks a lot like one in another field. Sometimes I find remarkable successes, and other times I find ambitious ideas that never delivered what their creators hoped. Both are valuable. Success tells us something about what people value, while failure can expose the assumptions that didn’t survive contact with the real world.

Of course, not every successful idea is a good one, and not every failed experiment was misguided. Timing plays a role, and so does plain luck. That’s why I find it more useful to understand the circumstances around a decision than to judge it by the result alone. The most interesting discoveries often have little to do with the question that started the search.

Looking Beyond the Familiar

There’s real value in stepping outside our comfort zones. We tend to gravitate toward subjects we already understand and ideas that confirm what we already believe. There’s comfort in familiarity, but there isn’t much room for discovery. Exploring something unfamiliar exposes us to different ways of thinking. We start to understand why people make choices we might never have made ourselves.

Sometimes those choices look brilliant, and sometimes they look completely misguided. Even when I disagree with an approach, I want to understand the reasoning behind it. That doesn’t require me to embrace every new idea or abandon what I already know. It only requires a willingness to stay curious, which may be the most valuable thing a good conversation leaves behind.

We Don’t Have to Have All the Answers

I have conversations like this with friends all the time, and they’re rarely planned. Someone mentions an article they read or a movie they saw. Before long we’re deep into subjects that weren’t on anyone’s mind when we sat down. We don’t always agree, and we certainly don’t walk away believing we’ve solved anything. The distribution question was only one stop on a much longer evening. There’s plenty more from that night I intend to unpack here, one thread at a time.

I enjoy these exchanges because they push us to consider possibilities. I’m comfortable admitting when I don’t know something. There are plenty of subjects I don’t understand, particularly in an industry going through this much change. Not knowing something doesn’t mean I can’t explore it. When I start researching, I’m rarely hunting for a definitive answer. More often I’m trying to understand the state of things at that particular moment, including what seems to be working. Those answers may look different six months from now.

Where This Leaves Us

Perhaps theaters and creators will keep building new paths to the big screen. Or perhaps the studios will adapt and hold their ground. I suspect we’ll see some of both.

What stayed with me from that weekend, though, wasn’t any particular prediction about the movie business. It was the reminder that some of the most valuable things we learn begin with a question we can’t answer. We don’t always need to know where a conversation is going, or where it should end. Sometimes it’s enough to step outside the familiar, look at the world through a different lens, and ask: What if?