On the relationship between film and its exhibition context and why it matters.

A film is not the same object at a multiplex, in a revival cinema, on a 65-inch television, on a laptop with earbuds, and on a phone. These are not variations on the same experience. They are different experiences of the same source material.

The exhibition context shapes attention in ways that are not optional: a multiplex showing creates a specific relationship to collective spectatorship, to the social contract of shared silence, to the physical experience of darkness and scale. None of these are replicated at home.

The home viewing context provides compensations: the ability to pause, to rewind, to watch in conditions of your own choosing, to watch with people who know you rather than strangers.

The streaming era has produced a generation of viewers who are fluent in home viewing and occasional in theatrical viewing. This is not a catastrophe. But it does mean that certain films — the ones where scale and collective attention are not incidental but constitutive — are being received in a context that misrepresents what they are.

The solution is not to restrict distribution. It is to be honest about what you are and are not seeing when you choose your exhibition context.