Posting through the movie: why people won't stop recording
When I saw Oppenheimer last summer, I remember being surprised to see a teenager whipping out his phone to record the Trinity test scene. It wasn’t the actual recording that shocked me. I’m used to the brightly lit phone in a dark theater even if my raised-in-the-early-00s brain spurs up those god awful piracy PSAs that used to play before screenings. What surprised me was the scene he chose to record.
The Trinity test is available on YouTube. There aren’t any A-list actors front-and-center. There’s no crazy CGI. There is very little spectacle at all. Christopher Nolan intentionally subdues the scene to let the horror of the world’s first atomic bomb speak for itself. The kid put his phone away just as Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer proclaimed, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” I distinctly remember thinking: “I’m going to see that on TikTok later.”
Fast forward to today and there’s a good chance that you’ve seen some of Deadpool and Wolverine’s most protected and fan-serviced moments without ever stepping foot inside an AMC. Movies like Deadpool and Wolverine are the type of unifying singular cultural event that brings people together, like Barbenheimer before it, Avengers: Endgame before that, The Lord of the Rings before that, et cetera and et cetera. Those unifying events are increasingly harder to come by the more fragmented and targeted entertainment becomes, the more expansive the term entertainment grows, and the more challenging it gets to persuade people to leave their homes for something they can get at home.
Movies beckon different tradeoffs today. Seeing the movie isn’t enough reward to justify the cost. Social capital used to mean time given to friends in physical spaces where friendship was solidified. It now means attention given to me that can be used to grow personal social followings and participate in online fandom. The reward of going to see a movie that will be available on a streaming service in a few months, if not on a pirated platform a couple of days later, needs to extend to areas where value is placed — social media. The reward for attention given is attention received.
Do it for the 'gram
There are ultimately three groups of people that end up participating in this screen-recording-to-post cyclical discourse whenever it reemerges: Posters, Tskers, and Shruggers. Posters are those who record small snippets of video, either of the screen or themselves, to post to social media. It is the equivalent of I post therefore I am. Tskers are those who appear on social media after a screening where they’ve witnessed a Poster in action or come across one of these videos on social media. They condemn the behavior. The Shruggers are those who come across these videos or see someone recording but don’t particularly care. They accept that this is what is.
The unspoken part of the Shruggers is that they accept this is part of theater going so long as theater going continues. Exhibitors have constantly reimagined themselves as the incentive to get people out of the house and to the movies changed. Arcades were put in the foyer for teenagers who wanted a place to hang out but didn’t particularly want to watch anything. Screens originally designed to house films were taken over by video game competitions and live special sports events. What never actually changed, however, was what took place inside the theater. People came to watch something with a community of like-minded individuals. Now the individual comes first as the community experience exists to serve their needs outside the theater. Technology didn’t itself change the culture around theatergoing, but it is responsible for what it enabled over the last many years.
This can get very long and convoluted very quickly, so let’s stick to the major beats. The number of hours that Americans spent with one another in shared third places — defined by those that are not work or home, including bars, cafes, and movie theaters — declined by nearly 40% between 2014 and 2019. That number grew to more than 50% after the pandemic. Time spent on social media within the same time grew by 61% from 90 minutes a day to 145 minutes. Time that Americans spend with digital video is expected to grow from three hours a day to four hours, per-eMarketer, and time spent with video games continues to increase with 41% of American teens gaming each day and 71% of gamers doing so to spend time with friends, according to Pew Research. To cap it all off, 56% of Americans in 2021 were regularly spending time in shared third spaces, down from 67% two years prior. Retail shops are closing, malls are at the lowest number they’ve ever been, and movie theater chains like Regal are closing up shop.
The reality is simple: as people spend more time online, there is less financial reward to keep shared third places going. By the time people want to go somewhere, those places no longer exist. This creates an epidemic of loneliness that we are now experiencing globally, but with no efforts amongst the lonely to prevent these physical places from dying out. A double-edged sword emerges. In order for more shared third places to exist, they have to change to accommodate the change in perceived value for people going, but that often means a disruption to the experience’s original value.
Seeing is Posting
If we break it down even further, incentivization is belonging, and belonging in 2024 is a combination of short lived physical events that create a long tail social currency. Barbenheimer was turned into a mini, short lived event that encouraged going to see the movie in order to partake in the phenomena through the subsequent act of posting photos and videos. The viewing experience is secondary to the experience of participating in a larger online trend. If a 23-year-old woman (a demographic that made up more than 60% of Barbie’s opening weekend audience) spends energy on creating the perfect outfit, buys tickets, and spends hours at a theater with the endgame being the online participation that occurs after, the perceived value of that original cost, energy, and attention required rises.
Barbie and Oppenheimer are 2023’s biggest version of this phenomena, but they’re hardly the first titles where online activity meets physical participation in order to beget larger sums of online currency (attention and connection). Universal Pictures’ Minions: Rise of Gru led to the well-documented viral “Gentleminions” TikTok trend. Teenagers dressed up as Gru to go see the film, often attending screenings in larger groups, and documenting it for social media. The more energy, time, and attention poured into the outfits and video, the stronger potential for greater reward on apps like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Participating required a finite level of attention; the ripple effects of online fame through picking up followers are infinite.
Not every movie is going to encourage the same activity because not every movie holds the same posting value. I should be explicitly clear here: this does not speak to the quality of the movie, but toward the motive for posting in the first place. Deadpool and Wolverine is the type of movie that is built around secret reveals and Hyper Online one-liners that travel well for the audience it’s geared toward: those who are going to gobble up every Variety story breaking down every hidden joke. Being first to post a clip or having the best audience reaction pretty much guarantees retweets, reblogs, reToks (what are these called anyway?) and a barrage of new followers. It also provides enough video for others to comment on as they share those clips, bringing the attention back to their opinion and their account for their own followers. It kind of looks like this:
The exhibitors are also incentivized to allow this activity to exist. People are still paying for those tickets, and they’re not actively recording the entire movie at the back of the theater on a camcorder. Trends also seem to suggest that creating reward for participation by showing proof of that participation — dressing up like a Gentleminion and recording in the theater during the movie for more clout on TikTok or recording the Barbie logo as it plays — encourages more people to show up to theaters. Current data suggests that 2024 will see “roughly 1.8 tickets sold per American,” according to strategist Matthew Ball and, even if 2025 sees a small bump to 2.5 tickets per American sold, it would still be down considerably compared to pre-pandemic times and shows that continued acceleration of what was already happening: people were going to movies less but seeing more of a specific type of movie. Each of the movies in the Top 10 to-date globally are sequels, reboots, or franchise continuations. Barbie was an original take, yes, but on a globally known IP.
Think of fandom participation as a hierarchy. The royal we is replaced by the royal me. How does this input (energy, time, and cost) and output (attention, and acceptance) benefit me long-term? If I post a video of being at a Taylor Swift concert, and watch that follower count skyrocket overnight, how does that incentivize my future actions to further participate? And how does that compare to Instagramming a screenshot of a Swift song I’m listening to on Spotify? Both are acts of using fandom to communicate identity, but the former is defined by some level of scarcity, dedication, and action. The latter is defined by passivity. How does my own social growth affect what fandom activities I choose to participate in and which ones I don’t?
Now, this isn’t a cry for exhibitors to host phone-okay screenings of popular movies. Let me be perfectly blunt: I’d love to encourage people to NOT record ANY part of a movie for social clout. It’s annoying. But it’s also not going away anytime soon so long as the value of participation in a cost-driven experience for newer audiences is tied to what happens after the movie, not what happens during the movie. While I wouldn’t expect to see clips of something like A24’s Oscar-buzzed Sing Sing start appearing on Twitter and TikTok, don’t be surprised if clips from Mufasa or Wicked or Joker do. We can continue to try and make theater going experiences as respectful as possible, and we should. It’s a shared space and that means polite etiquette must be prioritized. But we also have to acknowledge this isn’t going to stop, and if that self-oriented activity on top of in-demand franchise IP is what gets people to theaters, then maybe that’s the new world order that we have to accept.
