In this week’s newsletter: You’re all wrong about the most maligned seats in the house, which offer the purest form of moviegoing
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After so many years of doomy predictions about their coming demise, these are suddenly boom times for cinemas. A clutch of massive releases – most recently the all-time-record-breaking Spider-Man: Brand New Day – along with a heatwave that has transformed Britain’s parks into the Oklahoma dust bowl, has sent the nation sprinting (or at least fast-walking) to the air-conditioned environs of their local picture houses. In fact so packed are cinemas that, in order to find a free seat for Imax screenings of Spider-Man and the Odyssey, punters are having to resort to quite literally the lowest of the low: the front row.
Not that those same people are happy about it. Social media is full of grumblings from those lumbered with seats situated directly in front of the screen, often accompanied by pictures showing how vertiginous their views are: Agamemnon’s distended, helmeted head looming threateningly above them, say. I’m pretty sure a lot of these pictures are AI-generated fakes – mainly a chance to give Robert Pattinson a massive chin – but they are still spooking cinemagoers: Reddit is full of threads of panicked patrons asking just how painful their neck is going to feel after craning up at a screen for three hours.
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