AS HOLLYWOOD FLOUNDERS, MANY MOVIE THEATERS FILL SEATS WITH OLD PICTURES

President Trump’s renewed promise today to execute a 100-percent tariff on film production outside the United States is a symptom of a desperate state of affairs in the film industry. The stream of grim headlines coming out of Hollywood this year shows why. “Production in Hollywood plunges to historic lows as nearly half of US projects move abroad,” read one headline in August from Senal News. The story reports that Hollywood production jobs are down by 92,000 from 2022. And it’s not just a question of local production. Box office receipts are suffering too. “The 2025 box office is off to a terrible start. Is the problem supply or demand?” read the LA Times on March 25. The story says the problem is supply. There are fewer movies in theaters, fewer movies being made, and fewer people attending the movies that are in theaters. But you wouldn’t know it from the crowds at screenings of classic films at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. On August 14, I attended the third in a string of sold-out 70 mm screenings of a four-hour, 60-year-old sand marathon, David Lean's masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, in the large 750-seat main theater at the Music Box. It was a Tuesday night, and the film started at 6 p.m. and ended after 10 p.m. But the house was packed with viewers young and old and in-between. This was not an isolated incident. All over Chicagoland, movie theaters are quietly making bank screening old movies as new movie production in Hollywood sputters. Classic cinema screenings have become one of the industry’s few bright spots.

Michael Phillips reported on this phenomenon with a very good story in the Chicago Tribune on Valentine’s Day titled, “You know who’s suddenly flocking to old movies in Chicago? Young audiences.“ He focused on the Music Box and the Gene Siskel Film Center. But Phillips didn’t quite catch the full breadth of the trend. For example, he didn’t even mention Wrigleyville’s Alamo Drafthouse Theatre, which opened in 2023. That theater sells out screenings of old movies every week, and if you don’t reserve your tickets many weeks in advance the chance is you won’t be able to see them.

On Saturday night September 27, I was in attendance as Phillips (who retired from his job as the Tribune’s movie critic in August) introduced a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic Spartacus at the Gene Siskel Film Center on State Street in Chicago. This time the showing was sparsely attended. The rest of the world seemed to be out on the streets in the Loop, many of them preparing to go to a performance by Louis CK at the Chicago Theatre across the street from us. It was the second time the Siskel center had screened Spartacus, and perhaps the seating at the first screening was more full. Hopefully the trend is not beginning to tucker out. It does put some strain on the film canon, as Alamo for example has run multiple Kubrick retrospectives in the last two years. The screening of Spartacus was a part of one of the Siskel Center’s many film series with a variety of films selected for a common theme. In this case it was a series on “The Resistance,” with several movies that feature a rebellion against an empire or institution, such as Star Wars, Malcom X, and To Be or Not To Be with Jack Benny, which I saw at the Siskel too with a comfortably large crowd. The curated fun continues this fall, most notably with a lecture-and-film series called “Interiority on Film,” highlighting cinematic representations of interior thought and states, including Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Big city arthouses are not the only contributors to this trend. Classic Cinemas Lake Theatre in Oak Park, for example, nearly sold out its huge main room twice in one day showing Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) last year. The theater has also quietly screened Citizen Kane and other old films, including a series curated by talk radio star Nick Digilio. One wonders why these suburban theaters haven’t plunged more boldly into the classic movie business, as the new movies rarely sell as well as Casablanca did. Glenview’s Landmark at the Glen theater used to screen old movies, including Lawrence of Arabia, but has since stopped. 

There are theaters in the city missing the opportunity as well. Landmark’s theater in Lakeview, Landmark Century Cinema at Clark and Diversey, is also attempting to get by with only new films, and so is vulnerable to the critical lack of supply coming from the film industry in the wake of the pandemic and the recent writer’s strike. The only category of film that has risen in both supply and ticket sales is horror, the LA Times piece reports. "In the mid-budget category of films—movies that might be able to make somewhere between $50 million and $100 million theatrically in the U.S.—there was a decline of 40% in supply between 2004 and 2019," the LA Times quotes John Fithian as saying. Fithian was the top lobbyist for movie theaters until he left Cinema United, and is now the head of a consulting firm called Fithian Group. "That is $1 billion annually in lost revenues in the U.S. alone in that one category. That means almost 10% was lost just in the mid-budget category. In fact, the only genre that was increasing in supply and total grosses was horror ... Where is the mid-budget romantic comedy? Where is the mid-budget drama?"

Playing older films is not just a Chicago strategy. The big national chains have been turning to older content, too. Regal theaters remain loyal to the Fathom Events series, which screens several great older films each year. AMC no longer charges only $5 for its retro screening series, but the series still exists. Recently, after Robert Redford’s death, AMC River East in Chicago played some of his movies, including All the President’s Men and The Natural. Such curated series can help sustain the endangered species that is the multiplex. Both Regal and AMC are in serious economic trouble. Regal declared bankruptcy in recent years, though it is still operating, and AMC has continued to see revenues dropping and is $4.5 billion in debt, according to Yahoo! finance news. 

The Music Box, by contrast, is expanding, adding a new screening room to the south of the existing theater, with its mix of first-run art films and curated older films (e.g., two retrospectives of Billy Wilder films, a short retrospective on Fellini, a series on Kurosawa). Clearly the classic century-plus-old Music Box is doing something right. In a moment when Hollywood is struggling to produce the new, the Music Box is finding life in the old.