I refer to this episode in conversations all the time. The incredible movies from the 90s and early 2000s were largely possible due to the fluke of more theaters suddenly being available to show movies in. A sloppy summary below, but the whole ep is worth a listen.
"Back then [the 19060s], studios and theaters had a business arrangement: if a theater had a certain movie, nobody else in the area could play it. Seeing a film was kind of like seeing a painting or a Broadway show. It lived at one particular location, and you had to go there. But in the early 1970s, this began to change. Studios realized there was enough demand to release movies in the suburbs and the city simultaneously. Meanwhile, theaters divided their one big auditorium into two, three, or four auditoriums to make room for more screens.
Over the next six years, the number of movie screens in the United States increased by fifty percent. But these new movie palaces didn’t just pull moviegoers to the screen; they pulled movies to the screen.
Jack Foley was a distributor at Columbia and he says the megaplex was a Trojan horse for slipping strange, subversive movies into unsuspecting suburbs across America. If the latest teen movie was sold out, kids might end up seeing something like Being John Malkovich. And Being John Malkovich was not an outlier. The year it was released— 1999 —was a year that many people believe was one of the best movie years ever. Not only did all these great movies get made, but they were able to find an audience in Megaplexes across the country.
But this mini golden age of interesting, unusual, original films didn’t last all that long. The megaplex building craze had been so fast and furious that by the early 2000s there were way too many theaters. As the theater bubble began to pop, the creative one did too. For a while, booming DVD sales provided another revenue stream for oddball movies with a niche audience, but as DVDs disappeared later in the 2000s, the major studios leaned more and more on their big, franchise blockbusters.
By the mid-2000s, the movies were becoming a “first weekend” business. Studios tried to break blockbusters wide, opening on as many screens as possible, and theater owners realized instead of putting a different movie on every screen, they could give the blockbusters multiple screens with a new showtime every 20 minutes. As blockbusters took up more and more screens, smaller movies got squeezed out."
