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Comment by bongobongo | Hacker News Reader

“Event cinema” is precisely what caused this decline, transforming cinemas from clean, pleasant, affordable places to watch films with great audio and visual quality to today’s smelly, expensive, sticky auditoriums where digital video is crappily projected onto a wall and the sound is broken half the time. They decided to offer garbage and people decided to eat it.

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I would be willing to bet that today's theaters are both cleaner and have better projection and sound than any prior decade of their existence.

Lol you would be wrong, just Google it. Theatres used to have ushers to keep the noise down and to keep the rooms from getting trashed, sound engineers to cater the room to specific films, attendants to make sure everything went right—now it’s just on autopilot, with mixed results.

Pre-multiplex maybe? Or an atypical urban theater catering to film buffs. Or Imax. But my recollection of most theaters 20-30 years ago is most of the screens being postage stamp size, audio being subpar, and the level of staffing not much different from today.

This was also my experience going to the movies in the '90s in North Texas. Don't forget that this was before stadium seating was invented, so good luck being able to see the screen if the person in front of you is taller than you. I hated going to the movies back then.

Cinemark started a revolution when they invented stadium seating (but even then, the original incarnation was problematic because it wasn't wheelchair-accessible until Cinemark settled with the DOJ).

So, assuming you're right, how do you figure that change was directly caused by event cinema? I'm still curious to hear your answer.

How do you figure?

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