It’s difficult to come out of a theatre these days without a sneaking suspicion that no matter what you just experienced inside, your opinion was subtly coloured by something you had read about the film online. It can be a tweet, a meme, an edit or a reel, but almost inevitably, every movie-viewing experience nowadays seems to be influenced by a new fact or someone’s judgment you come across. When The Odyssey released a month ago, the internet instantly parted like the Red Sea: one side gushing with praise for the film’s technical prowess, the other bubbling with rage at Nolan’s unfaithfulness to the source material. Those who had the misfortune of not getting tickets on opening weekend were compelled to watch the movie slowly unfold on their phone screens, long before they managed to set foot inside a cinema hall.
Unless you’ve magically curated your algorithm to show you content that has no relation to the present, it’s impossible to go blind into a movie anymore. “Going to the movies has become synonymous with everybody’s need to tap into the ensuing discourse. It just pressurises you to watch movies in a rush and makes the whole experience feel like a bit of a chore,” says Ritwik Mishra, an avowed film buff. Despite not wanting to watch Obsession in the theatre because of the CBFC cuts, Aditya Singh, another cinephile, felt peer-pressured into going anyway. “Since I knew so much about the film already, I found myself sitting and waiting throughout for a particular scene that I had seen online of Nikki looking at the screen and screaming, ‘No, no, no,’” he complained.
As much as online discourse helps us experience a moment of communal culture and reminds us of the enduring appeal of films, social media forces us to partake in conversation about it, whether or not we have anything meaningful to add. This is especially intense around films with a huge fan base that waits years for sequels, only for the experience to be ‘spoiled’ on the second day. Sadie Sink’s character in Spider-Man: Brand New Day was kept under wraps throughout filming and press tours, and anybody familiar with Tom Holland’s complete inability to keep a secret knows how hard it must have been for him to play along. However, in utter disregard of Holland’s valiant efforts, Instagram and X feeds revealed Sink to be playing a certain redheaded superhero within just a day of its release. This compulsive need to document and post clips from cinema halls betrays an indifference, not only to other fans but also to the medium of film itself. It’s probably to discourage this behaviour that theatre staff now prowl cinema halls, checking to see if someone is surreptitiously recording clips on their phone.
