This won’t mean anything to you unless you’re on a certain part of the film-specific social media world but: The movies are back, baby! Less abstractly, the domestic box office rebounded to more than $9 billion in 2023. In 2022, the number was $7.4 billion. We have not returned to the pre-pandemic days ($11.4 billion in 2019), but Americans have shown a willingness to go back to the theater. And, though sequels and franchises continued to run rampant at the box office, smart, original adult fare snuck in there, too.
This was, of course, the year of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie led the U.S. box office with $636 million in receipts, becoming the first non-sequel (or franchise continuation) to top the charts since Finding Nemo in 2003. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer, a three-hour historical drama about the man who created the atomic bomb, finished fifth at the box office with $326 million. That film was likely aided by the memification of the Barbie double bill and the Christopher Nolan imprimatur, but these kinds of things don’t happen much anymore, so wind-assisted or not, it’s worth celebrating.
Generally, I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the box office on this site because I really don’t care about how much money lines the pockets of the wealthy (mostly) men who seemed determined to destroy the industry they lead. See the introduction to this series for my thoughts on that topic. But, if we accept the cinema as a communal experience, then the larger the community, the grander the experience. The world is better when more people go to the movies together.
In that spirit, I wanted to share some of my favorite theater-going experiences of 2023. Last year in this space, I lamented the closure of The Landmark and the Laemmle Playhouse. This year, I celebrate the reopening of the Eagle Theater and Vista Theatre and the conversion of the AMC Sunset into the Landmark Sunset, all of which factor into the great cinema experiences discussed below. We still don’t have the ArcLight, and if it ever comes back, it seems like it won’t be until 2025, but at least we can say that the bleeding stopped, or at least slowed, in 2023.
We’ll start in my neighborhood, a scant 10-minute walk from my front door, at the Highland Park Theater, itself the subject of closure rumors. As of now, it survives. In early March, I attended a late-night showing of Scream VI. Ever since a bootleg VHS copy of the director’s cut of the original fell into my too-young hands (a story I recounted here), this has been my favorite film franchise. Over 25 odd years, I have seen each new film in theaters. I have aged with these films and these characters.
So, you can imagine my joy at my 10:35 p.m. screening when a young couple walked in, sat a row in front of me on the other side of the aisle, and set their infant child, in its carrier, on the ground. I mean joy sincerely. The couple was respectful of the theater, the child was well behaved, and a good time was had by all. I could not help but notice that the father had set the child down facing away from the film, then went to the snack bar. Moments later, the mother looked down and adjusted the carrier to face the screen.
Don’t worry. The child was surely too young to comprehend the violence on screen and more than likely slept through the whole thing. My joy comes in knowing that the next generation is out there. Scream 2 came out in 1997. I was 9 years old. My dad took me on opening night – my first opening-night screening. This child won’t remember being at Scream VI with its parents, but they were there.
As of this writing, the Scream franchise is in shambles. The producers undervalued their star, Neve Campbell, and she sat out the sixth installment. They thought they had the next generation in line and were ready to leave the past in the past. But, life comes at you pretty fast. With preparations for part VII underway, they lost one star to a successful Netflix series and the other to hysteria over political comments she made (let the record show, she did nothing wrong). Then, the director left. It’s hard to make a movie without stars or a director. Maybe, they will. Maybe, it will be good. But, maybe the luster is gone.
In May, I made my first visit to the Academy Museum theater. Why it took me so long, I don’t know. The film I chose, though, could not have been a better introduction, and the Museum could not have been a better showcase for the high camp of Prince’s Purple Rain. The Academy theater has the best sound system I have ever heard, and if you are in the Los Angeles area, you owe it to yourself to make the pilgrimage. A proud member of the museum, I know I’ll be going back for years to come.
Come July, the world was ready for Barbenheimer. It hit with a force not even the most optimistic projections could have imagined. Then, it didn’t stop hitting. Barbie became one of three movies to top the box office for at least four straight weeks in 2023, joining Avatar: The Way of Water and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. It stayed in the top 5 for 10 straight weeks before having its theater count sliced to make way for the openings of the new Paw Patrol movie, Saw X, and The Creator.
Barbie’s opening weekend accounts for the highest-grossing single weekend of a comedy in history. Its second weekend is second place on that list. As of the end of 2023, it stands as the 11th biggest movie in the history of the U.S. and the 14th biggest movie ever worldwide. It is, of course, the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman. Gerwig’s accomplishment truly boggles the mind. This is all made sweeter, of course, by the brilliance of the film itself, a whip-smart, uproariously funny, subversive parable that deserves every penny of its success.
Right there alongside it the whole way was Oppenheimer, a grand cinematic achievement of a different sort. Boxed out of the top spot by Barbie, Nolan’s film set the record for the highest-grossing film never to hit No. 1, breaking a mark previously held by such cultural phenomena as Beauty and the Beast and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The film also had its own 10-week run inside the top 10. Whatever air Barbie had not sucked out of the room, Oppenheimer breathed for its own. There was nothing else this summer.
I caught a morning screening of Oppenheimer the Saturday it opened. The theater was mostly full, and the lobby was as pink as you might imagine. I held off until the Monday after opening weekend to see Barbie on the AMC Burbank’s magnificent Dolby screen. It felt like being part of a cultural movement, similar to when I attended the opening night midnight screenings of The Dark Knight and the original Avatar. Except, this was a Monday evening, yet the crowd was just as lively and invested. When I talk about shared experiences, this is what I mean.
The second time I saw Oppenheimer was about a month into its run, feeling the need to see it in Nolan’s beloved IMAX format. I attended the TCL Chinese IMAX in the heart of Hollywood, never an easy place to get to but all the more rewarding for it. I have my problems with the execution of the storytelling and characterizations in that film, but on that giant screen, it is an undeniable accomplishment. So big and bold and beguiling.
Two months later, I was back at the Chinese for AFI Fest, which I attended for the first time last year. Gerwig, the woman of the hour for her massive artistic and financial success, had been named the guest artistic director of the festival, offering her the opportunity to program a series of films she would introduce. I knew I must go to at least one of these screenings, and I chose the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death.
The film remains gorgeous, and Gerwig’s intelligent, impassioned introduction shone new light on an old classic. I won’t lie. She brought me to tears. Something about hearing a brilliant artist talk about something she cares about, it just gets me. Just like it got me the last time I saw this film, when Martin Scorsese screened it at the Lincoln Center in New York. It was impossible not to think of Scorsese discussing the film that night as I watched Gerwig deliver her own thoughts. Both are special artists, possessed of uniquely artistic souls. On this night of celebrating a classic, I knew the future, too, would be bright.
June 2023 brought the reopening of Vidiots, a long-beloved video rental store that had closed down a few years before. Lucky me, it reopened in my neighborhood. Of course, I have been a frequent customer. Ask me to see my membership card sometime. The new Vidiots space is attached to the old Eagle Theater, which had long fallen into disuse.
The team at Vidiots did a beautiful job renovating the theater and the programming has been second to none. I finally had a chance to go in December for a screening of American Fiction, followed by a Q&A with writer-director Cord Jefferson and composer Laura Karpman. It was a full house, as most Vidiots screenings have been. I look forward to attending more. And, failing that, you can probably find me among the racks of DVDs most weekends.
Speaking of the return of classic LA theaters, the Vista Theatre, now owned by Quentin Tarantino, reopened its doors in November. One of the last films I saw at the cinema prior to the pandemic was a screening of Titanic at the Vista. All theaters closed shortly thereafter, and it took the Vista a little longer to return. But, it has, in all its glory, returned, as beautiful as ever. I saw Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest there, a fittingly haunting film for that grand old place.
Finally, I will close out with a film I saw at the above-mentioned Landmark Sunset, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers. I will not dive too deeply on the film now since you will read more about it in future installments of this series. Andrew Scott, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell, three of the film’s four stars, were in attendance for one of the most insightful, delicate, and wonderful Q&As I have ever been privileged to witness.
Whether it was Scott talking about the emotional resonance of the story or Bell reflecting on his journey with his own family, the discussion was heartfelt and probing. It shared this in common with the film that preceded it, a screening I would wager drew more audience tears than any I have ever seen. I would never use tears to measure the quality of a film, but as a measure of the quality of the shared experience, they are perhaps second only to laughter.
I look forward to making 2024 another glorious year at the cinema and can only hope that the experiences I have over the next 12 months can live up to those of the past 12. As the world largely continues apace on its path of destruction and doom, within the four walls of the cinema, at least, I remain ever the optimist.
Check back next time for Part III of Last Cinema Standing’s Year in Review series as we take a look back at some of the best performances of the year.
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