My son and I returned to the movie theater this past Monday for the first new feature we had seen since late February. It was strange and novel to be back in front of the big IMAX screen with 100 decibel sound for Christopher Nolan’s time-travel thriller, Tenet.
We love going to movies and see about 30 new ones a year. Most are in theaters, but we stream a bunch, too. A couple years ago, I calculated our annual cost of going out to the movies at about $500. Since this was an IMAX movie with a large popcorn and Coke, this trip alone was over $60 for the two of us.
Related: Movie Musings: Annual Cost of Movies
We’ve kept a list and seen 21 movies at home since the 2020 Great Lockdown began. That’s just short of about 1x time per week since mid-March. it’s been fun to revisit some movies we haven’t seen in a long time, catch some that we missed when they came through the theaters, and discover some obscure films we might not have ever seen. My son is great at picking out the obscure films.
We haven’t done anything special with the money we’ve saved by not going to the theaters for six months. We are thinking about upgrading our big screen TV at home, so I guess we can put the savings toward that. For movies, sports, and TV series that could be a worthwhile splurge. I’m guessing I the future we’ll more be going out less and watching at home more.
How likely are you to return to movie theaters as they reopen this year and next?
MrFireStation 
Going to the movies is really rare for our family. A large TV with surround sound and being able to pause and go to the bathroom or kitchen for snacks makes the thought of going to the movies spending a bunch of money to feel the people behind you kicking your seat or talk during the movie while eating oily popcorn a non-starter. We make homemade air popcorn and use real butter on it. Still not healthy, but tastes better than the hydrolysed coconut oil stuff they use at the movies.
I will admit the large screen at the movies does give a better visual and sometimes my streaming quality of the movies we watch are not the best. I make up for being able to pause and re-watch a scene or even the whole movie.
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Air popped popcorn! We need to get one of those machines. My parents had one when I was a kid, but we’ve been eating microwave popcorn much too long.
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