Steven Spielberg Explains The "Powerful Experience" of Watching Movies in Theatres

I can’t wait to go back to the movie theaters to watch movies! I’m looking forward to the day when they will once again be filled with fellow film fans. Going to the movies has always been a wonderful and magical experience for me and I miss it!

It’s tragic to see how the pandemic has affected cinema over the past year, but it’s not going to be like this forever! Director Steven Spielberg recently shared his thoughts on the “powerful experience” of watching movies in theaters and why cinema will never die.

He recently wrote this little piece for Empire, and the thoughts he shares here are exactly how I feel as well:

“In the current health crisis, where movie theatres are shuttered or attendance is drastically limited because of the global pandemic, I still have hope bordering on certainty that when it’s safe, audiences will go back to the movies. I’ve always devoted myself to our movie-going community — movie-going, as in leaving our homes to go to a theatre, and community, meaning a feeling of fellowship with others who have left their homes and are seated with us. In a movie theatre, you watch movies with the significant others in your life, but also in the company of strangers. That’s the magic we experience when we go out to see a movie or a play or a concert or a comedy act. We don’t know who all these people are sitting around us, but when the experience makes us laugh or cry or cheer or contemplate, and then when the lights come up and we leave our seats, the people with whom we head out into the real world don’t feel like complete strangers anymore. We’ve become a community, alike in heart and spirit, or at any rate alike in having shared for a couple of hours a powerful experience. That brief interval in a theatre doesn’t erase the many things that divide us: race or class or belief or gender or politics. But our country and our world feel less divided, less fractured, after a congregation of strangers have laughed, cried, jumped out their seats together, all at the same time. Art asks us to be aware of the particular and the universal, both at once. And that’s why, of all the things that have the potential to unite us, none is more powerful than the communal experience of the arts.”

What do you think of what Spielberg said here? Why do you love going to the movies so much and what are your thoughts on the future of movie theaters?