Cinema’s dead – haven’t you heard? – along with radio, television, print media, vinyl records, and countless other mediums that have weathered the storm of new technologies and fickle audience attention. But while rumours of cinema’s demise have most certainly been exaggerated, there’s no denying it’s been a bumpy few years. First, COVID shuttered theatres and halted productions around the globe.
Then, dual Hollywood industry strikes in 2023 brought more cancellations, reshuffling and uncertainty, leading to a relatively lean release calendar in 2024. Thankfully, whenever the pickings are slim, cinema has a foolproof fallback: its own past. Even before COVID, retrospective programming was surging.
No longer merely the remit of auteur-friendly, arthouse picture houses, these days plenty of theatres cushion their calendars with an array of retro picks, from Hitchcock and Kubrick to Dirty Dancing and Cats . Tommy Wiseau’s so-bad-it’s-good mainstay The Room has enjoyed weekly late-night sessions at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova for almost 15 years now, while every summer, inflatable screens at parks, zoos, beaches and rooftops across the country light up with Labyrinth, The Goonies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Princess Bride, The Rocky Horror Picture Show ..
. the list goes on. And why not? Nostalgia sells, plus the technology is more accessible and high-fidelity than it’s ever been, contributing to the rise of Letterboxd culture and a wave of critical reappraisal f.