Sometimes there is nothing so depressing as reassurance. Seth Rogen is currently making a Larry Sanders-style comedy for Apple TV+ entitled The Studio, in which a bunch of Hollywood executives collectively freak out about the imminent death of cinema as we know it. The good news is that Seth Rogen has used a new episode of Variety’s Awards Circuit podcast to announce how bullish he is about the future of cinema in real life. The bad news is that he had to invoke museums.
“I think if movies were going to go away, they would have a long time ago,” he said. “Paintings are still around. People still go to museums! There’s things flashier or more ‘interesting’ than then oil on canvas, but people still flock from all over the world, enough to keep museums open.”
In one sense, he has a point. People do still go and look at paintings. Around 7.5 million of them went to see the Mona Lisa last year. They went to see it in such vast quantities that it caused overcrowding problems. That’s a bad thing when it comes to the Louvre getting acceptable Tripadvisor reviews, but a great thing when it comes to proving the ongoing appeal of paintings.
There is, of course, a fairly large hole in Rogen’s argument. Seven-and-a-half million people may have gone to see the Mona Lisa last year, but 151 million went to see Barbie. Clearly, there is a difference of scale at play here. The 151 million people buying tickets to see Barbie in a cinema allowed that film to gross over $1bn at the global box office. Meanwhile, if only 7.5 million people had gone to see it – the same number who paid to see the world’s most famous painting in the world’s busiest museum – then financially Barbie would have ended up doing slightly less well than Madame Web.
There is also the question of expense. The most expensive painting ever sold – ever, in the entire history of mankind’s ability to express meaning in images – is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, a 500-year-old portrait of Jesus Christ painted by the most famous artist ever to have existed. Its sale in 2017 prompted acres of controversy over everything from the veracity of the attribution to the vulgarity of treating art as a commodity. Salvatore Mundi was sold for $450m, which means that it roughly cost the same as the fifth Jurassic Park film. Does this mean the fifth Jurassic Park film is as historically significant as a Leonardo painting? Given that I’ve seen it twice and still can’t accurately explain its plot, probably not.
And nothing against museums – they’re great! – but one reason why people tend to visit them is that they’re cheap. And they’re cheap because governments often subsidise them. In the UK, a decision was made to treat access to art as a public right. Museums may still be popular, but it took government intervention to allow it.
This clearly isn’t true of the movies, because I went to watch Garfield with my kids last weekend and it ended up costing me so much that I felt like I’d had my bank account drained by an identity thief, plus it was roughly as culturally enriching as being suffocated by a hospital pillow. If the government decreed today that it would be using public money to make The Garfield Movie free to watch, in reflection of its cultural importance, there would be riots in the street. People would throw trays of lasagne through shop windows in protest. It would be carnage.
But at least my kids were excited to go and see Garfield. They are palpably less excited whenever I suggest a trip to a museum. Museums are quiet and static and intimidating, plus they generally have the air of death about them. But films are all about life and light and movement and spectacle. The day that going to the cinema becomes the same as visiting a museum is the day that cinema dies.
In a way, Rogen is right. Movies aren’t always going to be the dominant cultural medium. They probably aren’t that now. But hopefully, years from now, people will still flock to them enough to keep cinemas open. Just, you know, not to the Garfield Movie. Preserving an artform is one thing, but you should still have standards.
