Coolidge Corner standing strong against streaming services

This piece was published in Boston's local newspaper The Brookline TAB on May 2, 2019. For one of my classes, Reporting in Depth, I served as a staff writer for a full semester. You can find the originally published story here.

As Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and HBO continue to explode in today’s streaming climate, it’s still cool to go to the theater — the independent ones, that is.

Katherine Tallman, executive director and CEO of Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre, said she has seen no impact during the proliferation of streaming services.

“What I have heard people say, too, is that there is so much content streaming that people don’t know what to watch,” she said. “They know that if they come to the Coolidge or another independent theater that we have curated selections — they tend to like what we pick.”

According to Coolidge Corner Theatre’s annual report from 2018, the theater brought in $3.27 million in admissions and concessions sales alone. Meanwhile, Big Office Mojo reports that larger theatrical release theaters sold $11.89 billion in ticket sales in 2018.

Although there is still a significant difference in these revenues, Bill Lancaster, a senior lecturer of Communications Studies at Northeastern University whose research examines “evolving news and entertainment content creation and distribution systems,” doesn’t see a lasting future for these larger theatrical release theaters.

“The people who are going to lose mightily in this are the movie theater owners like AMC entertainment, the world’s largest theater operator,” he said. “These are the entities that are fighting tooth and nail to fight streaming.”

This “fighting tooth and nail” stems from the fact that streaming services are booming. Netflix, for instance, reported ending 2018 with a gross profit of $5.8 billion.

“What you are seeing happening with the Hollywood theatrical release compared to the streaming companies like Netflix is the ongoing situation of legacy media institutions succumbing to digital,” Lancaster said.

As many of these Hollywood theatrical release companies are having to think about how to keep up, interviews in Brookline and Boston show the indie-movie scene remains calm.

“The advent of the talkies was something people were terrified about, then it was VHS tapes, then it was Blockbuster [a video rental shop that ceased operations in late 2013], and now it’s streaming,” Tallman said. “Meanwhile, we are cranking along just growing our audience all the time.”

The Coolidge Corner Theatre is a member of Art House Convergence, an organization “dedicated to advancing excellence and sustainability in community-based, mission-driven media exhibition.”

Many independent, non-profit theaters across the country make up this association, including Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre. This past year, about 700 people were in attendance at their annual conference.“

"The independent theater scene is thriving across the country,” said Tallman. “There’s been much more appreciation of the need for connection, of the need for community, the basis of film as an educational tool, and as a platform for discussion.”

According to Art House Convergence’s 2017 annual report, 93 percent of audience members that the group surveyed said “Although there are films that art houses would have liked to show that are going directly to streaming sites, the impact at this point is most likely to be minor, not clear, or non-existent.”

“It’s really fabulous to work in a situation where there’s not competition,” said Tallman when asked about her experience with Art House Convergence. “We’re just trying to help each other, and we’re trying to learn from one another, teach each other, and share materials.”

Jen Margolis, a film and television student at Boston University, said streamed episodes have started to feel like large, theatrically released features due to the high budgets and ability to binge watch. She said she watched Netflix’s latest release of the television show “Russian Doll” in about 24 hours.

It allows the experience to feel like a movie, she said, but that doesn’t stop her from going to the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

In 2015, Margolis was glad to see the Coolidge Corner Theatre showing her favorite film “Back to The Future 2.” Rather than streaming it online, she enjoyed seeing it in the theater.

“All of this turmoil that we are talking about is driving a certain percentage of the population to go to indie theaters, like the Coolidge Corner Theatre, because certain people can only take so many Hulks and Avengers,” Lancaster said. “When the dust settles, they may come out on top in a way.”

Margo Ghertner is a Boston University journalism student writing as part of a collaboration between the Brookline Tab and BU News Service.