The End for Movies and the New Era of Streaming?

By Eric

It’s a Friday, May 29th 2026, you are waiting at a hot day in the entrance of a movie theatre. There are many people lining up to see the new movie titled, “Backrooms” where the movie centers around a non-Euclidean space that exist outside of normal reality. You are really excited about this since this movie was hyped up so much on social media.

You are not alone. Millions of people around the world are waiting for the opening of theaters. Currently, Backrooms is the 2nd highest grossing horror film this year just behind Obsession. Backrooms currently has made over $393 million worldwide.

Well, people may consider that an achievement since Kane Parsons, the director of the Backrooms was the youngest director to hit the Box Office #1, it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that in an age of the internet, it doesn’t surprise people that people prefer to stream their movies online instead of actually going to a theater.

In my opinion, both ways can be acceptable but I mainly would prefer to start streaming movies online. For starters, you don’t have to drive or walk to a theater like you would, you can just buy the movie or buy a subscription to watch movies. Second reason is that you can pause the movie at anytime. Third you can have snacks as you binge watch the latest movie that dropped on a movie service. For example, Pew Research, known for conducting public polls and demographic research stated, “About half of Americans (53%) said in a summer 2025 survey that they had seen a movie in theaters in the past year. A small share (7%) said they’d never seen a movie in theaters” (Desilver & Jackson 3). This is shown that more than half of the population started streaming movies online.

Well, as people say, movie theaters tend to give you snacks and allow for a more detailed and depth experience. For example, using the same source, Pew Research, they said that half of the American population prefer to watch the movies in a movie theater.

As concluding, it is your preference whether to watch a movie in a movie theatre or stream a movie online but statistically speaking, people stream movies online more than going to the theater to watch the movie.