When will experiences replace movie theaters?

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/experiences

by AndrewDucker • 14 years ago

77 55 14 years ago

delinka• 14 years ago

When people become less lazy. And when it's not so stinking expensive. Most people locally find a $10 ticket to a movie egregious. Nothing you can 'experience' is so cheap, nor is it close. The nearest metropolis with all these experiences is about 45 minutes away - so time, fuel, ticket price ...

People are lazy and broke. And fixing 'broke' doesn't usually fix 'lazy.'

jessriedel• 14 years ago

People don't go to the movies to experience adventure, they go to the movies to be told a story.

cbs• 14 years ago

I had the same thought, but I take it even further,

Most people also don't go to be told a challenging story, they want something simple, quick and easy like popcorn.

I don't really know how to find the source, but I once read that netflix customers will put movies they feel they should watch (like important pieces of cinema) into their queue, but when they arrive the customer let them sit around longer before watching them than a generic mindless entertainment flick.

pchristensen2• 14 years ago

Here's one such article: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/dvdextras/2006/09/i_queue...

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

You don't need to delve into netflix histories to see that truth made real, you just need to look at box office results.

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

Bingo. If I'm up for a complex meaningful story - of which there are many in my queue - I'd rather go do something. Dropped the DVD subscription in favor of streaming-only precisely because when I'm brain-dead enough to want to watch something I want to grab something suitably unenlightening from a menu of options, not whatever highbrow disc is sitting on my shelf collecting dust.

When the Great Netflix Psychotic Break happened, about a million customers came to the same conclusion.

toddh• 14 years ago

Going to the movies is an experience. It is the experience of the process itself (friends, meals, conversation, fun) and the meta experience of living someone else's experience on the screen. Is that really so bad?

bwooceli• 14 years ago

"What am I missing?"

Scale.

gee_totes2• 14 years ago

or LSD

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

I think these sorts of experiences burn out -- somebody has got to do a huge amount of work to create one and then how many times do you want to do it?

For instance, some people set up an indoor mini golf course with blacklights in a storefront at the mall near my town. My 9 year old and I went there maybe three times -- it was a cool idea but we weren't going to do it every weekend. They didn't quite last a year.

Similarly, a ski area that's a three hour drive from here set up a "ropes course" where you can put on a harness and climb up into thre trees. We had to pay for gas and a hotel stay plus the ticket and then my kid had a panic attack in the treetops and had to be talked down. Cool experience, but not something I can do every week.

The experiences which work out the best are the ones that we create for ourselves with a low budget -- like the frozen pond we discovered in a nearby state forest that we've been skating on or the radio transmitter club that a local amateur radio club is organizing this weekend.

lliiffee• 14 years ago

> how many times do you want to do it?

Well, I've been to the St. Louis City Museum he talks about many times and I can't imagine getting tired of it. (Enjoy sticking your arms out and getting rolled upside down in an antique gigantic wine barrel? Or sliding down frighteningly steep slides intended for transporting shoes? Or crawling upside down in a thunderdome style metal rig on the roof of the building? Or watching a several hundred gallon barrel fill with water until it tips over? Or climbing in metal chutes outside a hundred feet in the air to arrive at a plane suspended in midair by cables? I do!) However, there are few (if any) other places like that.

poppysan• 14 years ago

Love that place... It is a well designed experience, and you can find something new each time. This is what increases experiences replay value.

catshirt2• 14 years ago

the spy example is fair, but i think what has most potential are the immersive theatre experiences. like other comments referenced, sleep no more and secret cinema.

i really can't do sleep no more justice in a comment. "immersive", again, is probably the best word for it. it was quite successful and ran for several months beyond the final show last summer.

obviously it's a business, but i think it would be more apt to compare it to a play house, which still thrive where they can.

lurker17• 14 years ago

You don't see the same movie every week either, so...?

gee_totes2• 14 years ago

What am I missing?

Dear Author: you are missing Winkel and Blaktrick http://www.wandbevents.com/redesign/

They host events that are exactly the experiences you describe as missing from the city, and they are local to NYC.

Pro-tip: Don't go to the monthly events, only go to the seasonal ones that have a theme and story.

wotsrovert• 14 years ago

Winkel and Balktick are great.

I'm from NYC; this past Saturday there was a secret Night Market. Not a Winkel and Balktick event per se, but with some of the same people involved.

A Night Market is a collection of box trucks, rented for the evening and parked together in a deserted neighborhood of the city; each truck is kitted out with some form of experience/entertainment: one gave out perogis, another served tea; one was called "Thunder Cube" and hosted big pillow fights; the most elaborate one had a functioning hot tub.

The event's location was kept secret until the last minute, and attendance was limited.

My girlfriend and I produced a truck; it was called the "Peek-a-Boo Lounge" and was simply a place for people to sit and socialize. We used lumber, fabric, and sofa cushions to decorate the back of a 24-foot box truck, turning it into a two-level maze where people crawled around on their knees. There were 2 sets of day-glo Connect Four, a pair of naughty dice (leftover from a Valentine's Day event) and a day-glo stuffed carrot (leftover from Bugs Bunny costume).

It took the two of us a couple of days and about $600 to build (including truck rental). People seemed to enjoy it, judging from the laughter we heard in back; it was childlike. We received donations to help pay for the project.

I've found it's critical to find projects with good "bang-for-the-buck"; you want to enjoy yourself even when you're working.

These sort of "experiences" work because of the community they foster, and because they rely on imagination; much of the 'entertainment" is really just a cheap trick and that's part of the fun.

roc2• 14 years ago

The spy 'experience' described is just a theme park ride or haunted house with different set dressing.

The reason there aren't more of them is that the described mechanics are so cost-heavy that it would be prohibitive to scale and operate on an ongoing basis. It's challenging enough to make a museum/theme-park ride that shuttles a dozen people through an 'experience' on a track without the line becoming prohibitively long. If you multiply the time taken to 'experience' the ride by having people go through at their own pace and only one or maybe two at a time, the costs would soar and the line would be absurd.

Haunted Houses skew more toward the described spy 'experience' than theme park rides, but even still the flow is carefully designed, there are no wrong choices, rarely obstacles and even with ticket prices and lines notoriously unpopular, almost none can afford to operate without the artificial scarcity of an impending holiday packing demand.

There are very good economic reasons why theme parks and haunted houses stick to experiences on rails and in groups.

iamgilesbowkett• 14 years ago

The spy 'experience' described is just a theme park ride or haunted house with different set dressing.

This is why the answer to the OP's question is "never." "Experiences" were very popular before movie theaters even existed.

I think the "replace" part of the question is silly. Movie theaters never replaced live stage productions, in fact given population growth and increased leisure time there are probably more of those going on today than there were in Shakespeare's day. Likewise we actually have more hobbyists, archaeologists, and students making Stone Age arrowheads today than we had actual hunters making Stone Age arrowheads to hunt with during the Stone Age. Replacement is a myth in my opinion. But even if replacement were a logical model for this sort of thing, if anything it would be movie theaters which already replaced "experiences," back in the 1890s or something.

That, combined with 'you should follow me on Twitter here', has me tempted to filter out everything this guy writes. (I won't, but I'm tempted.) The 'you should follow me on Twitter here' meme started when somebody A/B-tested 'follow me on Twitter' phrases. Tons of people who read that post adopted the phrase which that one person found most effective.

Problem is, A/B-testing is extraordinarily context-sensitive, and quality is much more important than quantity on Twitter. It's not a video game where the person with the most followers wins. If anything, it's a video game where the person with the smartest, least annoying followers wins. So "you should follow me on Twitter here" is cargo-culting in the service of a goal which is questionable at best.

I basically think that meme is stupid beyond words, and I very much disagree with this blog post, but despite all this, I'm not trash-filtering this domain (I use a custom HN viewer app I wrote which trash-filters a lot of domains, e.g., TechCrunch, anything Zed Shaw). Reason is, the Aaron behind aaronsw.com also wrote a terrific Twitter conversation viewer. So, I might disagree with the guy, but I love the tool he wrote, and I use it all the time, which is really the most sincere, practical form possible of respecting somebody's idea.

rant rant rant ramble ramble ramble

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Indeed, the obvious way that society has found to achieve these things is ... video games.

It's eerie how now that computers are intertwined with our lives, the idea of an advancing virtual reality, able to give interesting experiences, is not something people fax poetic about anymore. The computer has already been assigned to some other category in most people's minds. Yet virtual reality will still advance and eventually give nearly any experience we might imagine.

Willwhatley• 14 years ago

What I take to be your mistake ('fax' for 'wax poetic') is an intriguing Freudian slip in this context.

T-hawk• 14 years ago

These "experiences" like flying like Peter Pan absolutely exist now, things like bungee jumping or hang gliding or ziplines. Most tourist areas and theme parks have lots of upcharge attractions of this sort. The scarcity of their limited capacity drives prices up. (Remember, in capitalism, prices are set by supply and demand, not by cost.)

This sort of service-intensive experience requires a large density of premium customers to justify going for that over a more mass-market entertainment approach. Indeed, theme parks themselves are moving more and more towards the theater model, because that scales so much better with much more capacity. Disney and Six Flags and Universal have upgraded many parks with huge theaters and shows. The best roller coasters and dark rides can run around 2,000 guests per hour; a theater show can hold 5,000 or more with minimal line-waiting.

Just like software, a capitalist can duplicate the movie experience for thousands of watchers at nearly no marginal cost. Compare that to a Broadway play which requires a hundred paid workers to stage a more personal performance. Broadway does exist thanks to New York's density of wealth, but that's the exception. Every town has a movie theater, because the pricing fits into everybody's everyday budget, and the physical hardware is easily constantly repurposed to a new movie.

roc2• 14 years ago

Sure, but the original article is talking expressly about immersive experiences. A line of people waiting to crawl through a laser-tripwire room is the only economically feasible way to scale what he's talking about, but it's expressly not what he's talking about. That's what I was trying to get at.

You can build it. But it's dubiously economical (or incredibly expensive) unless you start stripping away at the immersion to streamline it.

sayhellolondon• 14 years ago

Secret Cinema are already doing this in London, they create the full experience immersing you in the feeling of the film with unique locations and themes.

Here's what they did for One flew over the Cukoo's nest - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nHZAZZqOqM

Likewise Bugsy Malone - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOnswf7XaOE

Yhippa• 14 years ago

There's already a pretty good proxy for this: video games. Want to make your own story? Try D&D.

sselby• 14 years ago

This is sort of what Sleep No More http://sleepnomore.com/ is doing and it's pretty successful. It's also in a place where that sort of thing can thrive.

misuba• 14 years ago

The OP called this out by the theater company's name, Punchdrunk, and dismissed it as "pretentious."

sopooneo• 14 years ago

The logical extreme (depicted): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119174/

smacktoward• 14 years ago

I was thinking more http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070909/ , myself...

iterationx• 14 years ago

When we build the Metaverse.

WA• 14 years ago

In Germany, ropes courses gained a strong increase in popularity over the recent years. They are pretty fun and you can "magically fly" through the forest. You get this harness and can lock yourself into 300 feet long ropes in 30 feet heights and just fly from tree to tree. I'm sure, you can find them also in the US. If you get the opportunity, check one out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ropes_course

timmaah• 14 years ago

One of these was built recently in my backyard. Looks like great fun and they do good business. (Though I'm not going to pay $100 to tour the woods I hike daily for free)

http://www.smuggs.com/winter/amenities/canopy-tour.php

Another ski area just built a huge indoor waterpark.

There are tons of these types of adventurous opportunities out there. Movies are for the lazy.

timjahn• 14 years ago

Not sure if you've ever ziplined before, but the experience is totally different than hiking. Ziplining is definitely worth experiencing.

andrenotgiant• 14 years ago

Everyone here is talking about the limitations of scale and repeat-business when it comes to these "experiences"

Science Fiction writers have solved these problems already, just tap directly into the brain, Minority Report style. Now all you scientists just need to catch up.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

Now all you scientists just need to catch up.

No, we just need to find the small door. John Malkovich won't be amused, though.

xlevus• 14 years ago

I've been to two 'Immersive Theater' 'experiences' which sound similar to the spy experience mentioned in the article. And I found them rather contrived.

The actors stick to a script, and any attempt to interact or change the outcome of the experience is largely ignored. If I wanted to be ignored I'd go to the cinema, musical or a normal theater production.

Other experiences, e.g. Clay Shooting, treetop walks, jetboat rides and the such are generally prohibitively expensive to do once a week, and aren't really accessible unless you live close by. At least with the cinema I can afford to go once a week, see something different each, and it's a short walk/train/bus journey from home.

catshirt2• 14 years ago

this is disingenuous. there are other elements to immersive theatre than being included in the script. would you say the same about going to a play?

that said, i've been to shows where they use the audience. it depends on the production. likewise, i'm sure there are some movies you enjoy and some you wouldn't.

lesterbuck• 14 years ago

If you want the flying experience, there is Thrill Park near Dallas.

http://www.gojump.com/

Their bungee jumping on steroids, dropping face up from 120 feet, is so scary that it was used in studies of time perception:

http://www.k2i.rice.edu/EventsList.aspx?EventRecord=17603

morisy• 14 years ago

Don't get hung up on the "immersive theater" examples: Similar arguments would have been used to shoot down YouTube and the social web years ago. Instead, I think there's a lot of ground to be covered in lightly immersive, highly tailored experiences that reflect and tell stories through and about you, your friends and your environment. Narrative art doesn't need to be pinned to a screen, and neither does the magical shared experience of theater.

michaelfeathers• 14 years ago

One thing that is amazing to me is how theaters are really pushing to fill seats with special event viewings and attempts to rent out their theaters for meetings, and all the while, if they actually had a stage in their theaters, they could probably make money in off hours with local productions.

icebraining2• 14 years ago

I've never been at an "experience" where I could suspend my disbelief.

Taking the given example, when watching a movie, I can believe Matt Damon is a spy. I can't make myself believe I'm a spy. Whenever I'm in such situation my brain screams at me how ridiculous the premise is.

Experiences where I don't have to believe something ridiculous - playing paintball, for example - are enjoyable, but they don't replace movies, not by a long shot.

PaulHoule2• 14 years ago

A spy is the last thing I want to be.

There was a time I was on mailing lists and chat rooms where I know some of the people were connected with intelligence services and national police agencies, not just which ones.

At this point your life gets weird... People call your wife when you're not home with caller ID blocked and try to trick your wife into installing malware on your computer, etc.

It might be a little exciting at first, but the trouble you can get into in that life just isn't worth it.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Charles Stross wrote, in an introduction to a book, about the difference between James Bond and real spies, and pointed out that they are on the complete opposite side of any given spectrum.

Nobody wants to pretend they're a spy. Everyone wants to pretend they're James Bond.

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

I always wanted a movie version of those Choose Your Adventure books. Go to Theater A if you want to kill him.

gosub• 14 years ago

The "experience place" that I would like to go to is like a kindergarten for hackers, a "hackergarten". It would let me play with many things that are too much of a commitment to do at home, like gardening or small woodwork or microcontroller electronics, and also it could have micro-courses, like a 2 hour lecture on magic tricks or kite building or simple chemistry.

neilk2• 14 years ago

Some hackerspaces are much like you describe, although, they are not as well organized to accept low-commitment walk-ins at any hour of the day. But that sounds like an interesting way to keep the space going -- half the space is entry-level fun at a modest price, half the space is the usual craziness.

daralthus2• 14 years ago

You can go to workshops organized by hackerspaces or fablabs. Or you can look around and find a meetup you like.

http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_ALL_Hacker_Spaces http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/labs/ (seems to be missing some places) meetup.com

daralthus2• 14 years ago

Also I would like to mention http://www.super-marmite.com/ http://letslunch.com/ and all the other eat/cook with somebody opportunities.

You don't have to be a spy or somebody else to have some adventure. That idea is limited, just combine it with some other needs and there you have it.

jerf• 14 years ago

You know how everyone wonders how "unskilled" people will make money in the post-material-scarcity future? This is one of the answers. Only one of many answers, but one nonetheless. You can add value to someone's "experience" and capture some of it.

neilk2• 14 years ago

Burning Man is, in theory, devoted to interactive art. But, speaking from experience, those sorts of artworks are incredibly hard to create. In the Bay Area we have an interdisciplinary art community that can pump them out on a regular basis, but the costs to people's personal lives are immense. (Not to mention that people who like to create this sort of stuff rarely want to run it on a regular basis. They want to be Imagineers in their spare time, not full-time carnies.)

And what do we get when people show up? People seem to enjoy looking at the bizarre interactive stuff -- it gives them permission to be freer -- but most people, it seems, want formulaic experiences. They like dancing at sound camps, intoxication, and riding around on art cars in costumes. Which is just a typical Friday night clubbing, only more so.

But rather than criticize them for being unadventurous, let's look at what makes these experiences work. Music was invented a few hundred thousand years ago and there aren't many more direct routes to people's pleasure centers. It's also evergreen; a sound camp can swap DJs every few hours and have a different experience in the same environment.

Complicated art or interactive installations do their thing, but if you have a five ton sculpture that whirls boulders around, well, that's what it does. Rarely can they be as protean as a music hall or a movie house, or your personal computer.

The best you can do is some sort of hardware/software combination, like the Cubatron series, which has had various incarnations as a sort of 3d screen saver build out of LEDs. Syzygryd is an interactive, collaborative music sequencer in the shape of a giant sculpture that lights up and shoots fire.

Perhaps the best urban interactive experiences will be like that -- there might be some expensive hardware built component, but they need to plug into some inexhaustible source of new ideas too.

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

If you want "experiences", they're there for the taking at any cost from free to $OMGk.

The problem isn't so much providing them (although other posters address the issue of cost), it's whether the customer does, in fact, want to do his part. Go to a movie theater, look around, and ask what percentage of attendees would, in fact, want to spend the next 2 hours going thru an approximation of what they're going to sit there, mouth agape, staring at. Most wouldn't, even if they could - which most couldn't.

The opportunities for experiences are there. Skydiving. Romance. Wilderness adventure. World travel. Competition. Artistic expression. Whatever. Spend as much or as little as you like, in both time and money. I've seen all kinds of "experiences" appear and flourish in a few decades. Lots of people participate in them, as the height of our culture allows and facilitates unprecedented indulgence in luxury "experiences". Oh, they may not be as objectively exciting, but subjectively they can be fantastic (first time I did paintball - about the same price & duration & space as a high-end movie - it sure wasn't a James Bond film, but instead of "that was neat, now what" I drove around the city loop twice screaming in residual endorphin rush).

The key is audience participation. Anyone can jet off to exotic locations for wild times for just a few days' salary, and for even just the price & time of a movie go leap out of an airplane or take a romantic walk. Most, however, would rather push a button and say "here we are now, entertain us."

pchristensen2• 14 years ago

Movies trade gargantuan fixed costs for low marginal costs. Probably a trillion dollars over the last 100 years has been spent making, distributing, and screening movies. Theaters are a channel where a studio can expect to put $100M in and get $75-200M out, $10 at a time. (more if you count shady Hollywood accounting). Not only do unique experiences have much higher marginal costs, there is no channel or business model for huge amounts of money to invest in producing these experiences.

To put in perspective, he listed 2 experiences that might have thousands of visitors a week. Eyeballing last week's box office results, it looks like ~$150M across major movies. That means 15 MILLION people went to the movies last week just in the US.

Movies are a cost and effort-effective way to be entertained, and a predictable and profitable way to invest huge amounts of money. That's why there's everywhere.

rdouble• 14 years ago

The 5 Wits thing mentioned sounds a lot like the Jejune Institute in SF. There's a whole city in the desert called Las Vegas that was explicitly designed as an experiential entertainment venue. One could argue that entire areas of New York have become theme parks offering constructed urban lifestyle experiences. Related, the way Americans consume travel and outdoor recreation is very engineered for specific experiences.

salem• 14 years ago

What about modernizing the arcade game experience, I would love to see this scaled out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg8Bh5iI2WY&feature=playe...

When will experiences replace movie theaters?

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