Runcolo – Ideas & Analysis

The Multiplex Is Quietly Losing

There’s a specific kind of silence that happens when you walk into a massive cinema lobby at 7:45 PM on a Friday night and realize you’re one of maybe seven people there. The sound bounces differently in those cavernous spaces when they’re empty. The staff looks tired in a way that doesn’t quite have a name yet. You buy your ticket for whatever superhero film is playing, sit in a theater designed for 1,200 people, and try not to think about what this moment means.

The numbers started telling this story quietly in late 2024, but by now they’re impossible to ignore. The UK’s Cinema Exhibitors’ Association reported something that should have made more headlines: independent venues with fewer than 50 seats saw their revenue climb by 27 percent while multiplexes with over 1,000 seats watched their attendance slip 9 percent. That gap is growing. It’s not cyclical. It’s structural. Something has shifted in how we want to experience cinema, and the massive theater chains built on the economics of the 1990s simply didn’t see it coming.

What a 54-Seat Theater in North London Discovered

Lexi Cinema sits in Kensal Rise, which is the kind of neighborhood most people pass through without really noticing. It’s not trendy in an Instagram way. It’s just authentically itself: residential streets, a strong community, the sort of place where people actually live instead of performing living. The cinema holds 54 people. In Q4 2024, it reported a 94 percent average occupancy rate. That’s not just good. That’s nearly full, night after night.

The national multiplex average occupancy was 61 percent. Let that sit for a moment. A tiny venue in North London is running at 94 percent capacity while the massive chains with IMAX screens and premium recliners are watching three-quarters of their seats stay empty most nights. This isn’t happening in one city or one market. This is happening systematically in cities across the UK and North America. The micro-cinema model works because it fundamentally respects something that multiplexes abandoned somewhere in the 2010s: the idea that cinema is social.

The Curator’s Advantage

When Metrograph announced its January 2025 programming calendar, something unusual happened. Every single screening sold out within 72 hours. The venue has 176 seats across two screens. Every program date. Gone. This is a two-screen cinema in Manhattan operating with the scarcity of a hot restaurant reservation, not the accessibility that cinema promised to be.

Here’s what matters: Metrograph doesn’t show the same films as every other cinema. Someone is actually choosing what plays there. There’s a thesis. There’s a voice. You go to Metrograph to see what Metrograph wants you to see, not just whatever the major distributors demand. That curation isn’t a luxury add-on anymore. For younger audiences especially, it’s the entire value proposition. A 2025 Eventbrite report found that 68 percent of people between 18 and 34 actively prefer intimate, curated experiences over large-scale venues. They’re not trying to see the next Marvel film on the biggest possible screen. They’re trying to be somewhere that means something.

The Metrograph NYC Programming model has spread because it works. The Independent Cinema Office UK Data shows that licensed micro-cinema spaces in US cities over 500,000 people grew from 340 locations in 2022 to over 890 by January 2026. That’s a 162 percent increase in less than four years. These aren’t boutique exceptions. This is becoming the dominant model in major markets.

What We’re Actually Losing

There’s something worth naming here that goes beyond attendance figures. When multiplexes decline, we lose things that don’t show up in any revenue report. The theater where a teenager went on their first date. The place where strangers became neighbors through shared screenings. The casual walk-in possibility of cinema, the chance encounter with a film you weren’t planning to see.

Micro-cinemas curate beautifully, but they also curate for an audience. If you’re not in that audience, you might never know they exist. The old multiplex was a democratic space in its own way, even if that democracy was administered by corporate chains. You could show up without planning ahead. You could just go because a film looked interesting and a theater near you happened to have a 7 PM showing.

The gain in intimate, intentional experiences comes paired with a loss of spontaneity and accessibility. That’s the trade. We’re choosing depth over breadth, curation over casualness, community over convenience. Whether that’s a net positive depends partly on where you stand in the city and partly on what you believe cinema should be.

The Future Is Smaller, But Not For Everyone

The micro-cinema revival is real and measurable and it’s reshaping how we experience films. But it’s worth sitting with the fact that this shift concentrates cinema culture in specific neighborhoods and specific cities. The 890 micro-cinemas operating in major US markets represent genuine community and genuine curation. They also represent a market that’s learned to serve its most engaged audience exquisitely while leaving others behind.

What’s happening right now is that cinema is fragmenting. It’s becoming boutique in the literal sense: expensive, selective, requiring knowledge to access. That’s not necessarily a tragedy. Small theaters make better films possible. They make programming risks possible. They create the kind of spaces where something actually matters. But there’s a melancholy in watching the massive theaters empty, knowing that they represented something important too, even if what they represented was mostly just the democratic principle that cinema should be available to anyone with eight dollars and nearby transportation.

If you’ve noticed one of these micro-cinemas opening near you, or if you’ve been meaning to check one out, now’s the moment when they’re actually thriving. The numbers suggest this isn’t a phase. This is what cinema looks like when it survives by mattering more to fewer people instead of mattering less to everyone. What’s your experience been with independent cinemas? Are they reshaping how you experience film, or does something feel different about them to you?

The Moment Everything Shifted

There was this specific moment in late 2024 when you could feel the ground move. It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t announce itself. But if you were paying attention to what people actually wanted to do on a Friday night, you noticed: the conversations had changed. Nobody was debating which streaming service to subscribe to. Instead, they were asking each other, “Did you get tickets to that screening?” The shift from passive consumption to active participation happened so quietly that most people missed it entirely.

By the time we hit 2025, the numbers caught up to what the culture was already feeling. The number of registered independent cinema venues across the country nearly tripled in just three years, jumping from 340 spaces in 2022 to over 870 by early 2026. That’s not a trend. That’s a recalibration. People voting with their feet and their money, choosing to sit in rooms with strangers who wanted the same thing: to experience cinema as an event again, not as content consumed alone.

Why Independent Theaters Started Looking Like Gallery Openings

Think about what a gallery opening actually is. It’s not primarily about the art on the walls, though the art matters. It’s about the gathering. It’s about being in a room with people who have taste similar enough to yours that you want to know what they think. There’s a social energy that exists nowhere else. You dress a bit nicer. You arrive knowing that something intentional is happening. You expect to have a real conversation.

Independent micro-cinemas figured out they could build that same energy around film. The spaces themselves became part of the offering. A restored 1920s theater in Portland showing 16mm prints of silent films. A former warehouse in Detroit converted into an intimate screening room with a bar that actually understands beverage culture. A rooftop setup in Austin showing restored Criterion releases under the stars. These weren’t multiplex experiences sanitized for mass consumption. These were curated experiences designed by people who loved cinema enough to stake their credibility on their selections.

The programming reflected real taste-making rather than algorithmic calculation. Organizers weren’t trying to please everyone. They were trying to create something worth talking about. That specificity, that deliberate curation, became magnetic. In cities under 500,000 people, ticketed film screening events grew 78 percent faster than live music events in 2025. People had options for live entertainment. They chose cinema. That choice means something.

The Distribution Model That Changed Everything

What made this possible wasn’t just demand. It was infrastructure. The MUBI Go Live Program Details expanded dramatically throughout 2025, reporting a 55 percent year-over-year increase in partnerships with physical screening spaces. What MUBI understood, and what the industry had been slow to grasp, is that some films don’t need wide theatrical releases and streaming windows. Some films need community. They need the right room full of the right people at the right moment.

The logistics are worth understanding because they explain why this moment landed when it did. Independent distributors and platforms created pathways for micro-venues to access films that might never have played beyond a festival circuit or limited theatrical release. A theater with 50 seats in a mid-sized city could now show the same recent releases as a 400-seat art house downtown. The Cinema Foundation Independent Venue Census 2026 documented this shift in real time, revealing that the venues weren’t clustered in major metros. They were distributed across the country, often in places where cinema had been written off as a viable cultural experience.

The financial model worked because of pricing. People paid more for tickets to smaller venues because those tickets represented something, specifically curation and access. A micro-venue ticket wasn’t competing with Netflix. It was competing with a night out. When you frame it that way, eight to twelve dollars suddenly feels reasonable again.

The Pre-Release Phenomenon That Shattered Marketing Assumptions

Then Bong Joon-ho’s 2025 film “Mickey 17” arrived, and it proved something the industry had been too invested in traditional marketing to admit: grassroots momentum beats algorithm recommendations. The film screened at over 200 independent micro-venues before its wide release. By the time the $200 million marketing budget kicked into gear, the buzz had already been generated by people in rooms with other people, talking about what they’d just watched.

The pre-release screening strategy created anticipation that marketing budgets simply cannot manufacture. It was organic in a way that felt almost radical. Critics saw it. Cinephiles saw it. They told people. Those people bought tickets. And by the time the studio’s machinery engaged, it was amplifying something that already existed rather than trying to create desire from scratch. That’s a different economy of attention entirely.

What Happens When Supply Meets Demand This Perfectly

Cinespia, the Los Angeles-based collective that pioneered outdoor and micro-venue screenings, sold out all 42 of its events in 2025. Every single one. On the resale market, tickets were moving for an average of $85 on StubHub. Think about that figure. People were paying premium prices for the privilege of sitting outside watching a movie. Not because the movie was exclusive. Not because they couldn’t watch it at home. Because the experience was worth something.

This is what happens when supply meets demand with good timing. You have technological infrastructure that didn’t exist five years ago. Venues that were sitting empty or being repurposed for other things, suddenly activated as cultural anchors. Younger audiences who grew up on streaming and are discovering, almost by accident, that there’s something different about cinema as a collective experience. Curators and programmers who have been waiting for the culture to catch up to their vision. All of these forces aligned in 2025.

The question now isn’t whether independent cinema will continue to grow. The Cinema Foundation Independent Venue Census 2026 shows growth trajectories that suggest this isn’t a moment anymore. It’s becoming infrastructure. The real question is what stories you want to witness, what rooms you want to sit in, and who you want next to you when the lights go down.

The Rebellion Nobody Expected to See on Paper

Something shifted in the underground last year. Not the kind of shift you catch in real time. It’s the kind you notice when you’re standing in a gallery or a basement or somebody’s apartment and you realize half the people around you are holding things that feel expensive because they’re rare, not because they cost money. Zines are back. Not in some nostalgic, retro-boutique way where everyone’s pretending it’s 2003. This is different. People are explicitly rejecting the entire infrastructure of algorithmic generation and choosing to make magazines by hand, one at a time, on paper that could be recycled cardboard or weird specialty stock from a printer who’s been doing this for thirty years.

The numbers tell part of the story. Last year, Printed Matter’s annual art book fair, the oldest and most respected gathering of its kind in North America, saw a 28% jump in first-time zine exhibitors compared to just two years prior. But what matters more than the percentage is what those makers were saying when they set up their tables. They weren’t selling zines. They were selling proof. Proof that a human made this. Proof that no algorithm had a say in it. Proof that this thing in your hands came from a real person’s brain and their actual hands.

The Economics of “No Robots” as Aesthetic Principle

The marketplace figured this out faster than almost anyone predicted. Etsy, which has become the default storefront for independent print makers the way Instagram became the default gallery wall, released internal data in late 2025 that surprised nobody who’s been paying attention: zines and handmade print publications explicitly tagged as AI-free were moving at a 37% price premium compared to identical unmarked items. This wasn’t a small difference. This was customers saying they would literally pay more money to know for certain that their purchase didn’t involve a machine learning model anywhere in the production chain.

That’s not just a market correction. That’s a value system. And a lot of young people have signed onto it. When the Society of Publication Designers 2025 industry report surveyed independent print designers under thirty, 68% of them listed resistance to AI aesthetics as a primary reason for choosing analog production. These are people who grew up with smartphones in their pockets and who could, theoretically, use generative design tools to speed up their work. Instead, they’re choosing to spend four times as long on a project because they want to know where every choice came from.

Where the Movement Actually Lives

The No Robots collective started in Brooklyn in mid-2024 in that way that things start in Brooklyn, which is to say a few people noticed they were all angry about the same problem and decided to do something about it instead of just posting about it. By January of this year, they had over 3,000 registered zine makers affiliated across 14 American cities. In February, they hosted their first national print fair in Chicago. I talked to someone who went. She said it felt like the thing that printed-matter fairs used to feel like before they got too big and too professional. That exact density of intention.

The collective’s model is simple and radical by current standards: documentation that a zine was made without automated tools. No AI image generation. No algorithm-assisted layout. No machine learning anywhere in the pipeline. It sounds almost absurdly analog until you realize that this is genuinely valuable in a world where you can’t trust visual media anymore. A zine with a No Robots stamp on it is a zine you know you can trust to be what it claims to be.

What Happens When Print Outsells the Algorithm

In London, a small shop called Tenderbooks has been selling art books and zines for twelve years. In that entire period, zines were always secondary. Artist monographs were the main event. But in 2025, something inverted. Zine sales outpaced monograph sales for the first time in the store’s history. The zine section revenue increased 55% year-over-year. The shop’s owner, when asked about it, said something like: people are hungry for something they can actually verify. Something that carries proof of its own authenticity just by existing.

This matters because shops like Tenderbooks are where you find out what people actually want when the algorithm stops dictating the recommendations. They’re the physical world equivalent of what would happen if Instagram got shut down for a week. Real taste re-emerges. Community taste. Not algorithmic taste. And it turns out, when given the choice, a significant number of people want to buy things that come from another human’s hands. They want imperfection. They want irregularity. They want the proof.

The Permanent Lesson of This Moment

Zines aren’t coming back because they’re retro. They’re coming back because they’re honest. That’s a harder thing to build a movement around than nostalgia, and it’s a much better reason. When you put a stapler in someone’s hand and ask them to make a magazine, what they make will look and feel like something a person made. There’s no way around that. No filter between intention and result.

What we’re watching right now is people choosing friction. Choosing process. Choosing verification. It’s not a permanent victory against the machines. But it’s the establishment of something that actually matters: a space where human-made objects have explicit value. Where the fact of their creation is more important than their optimization. Where a zine made by hand, sold in a basement or at a fair or shipped in a padded envelope with a handwritten note, is worth more than the same zine could ever be if an AI had touched it anywhere.

If you want to understand where culture is actually moving right now, stop looking at what the algorithm is promoting. Go to a zine fair. Talk to the people making them. Buy something that came from human hands. Notice how it feels different. Then come back and tell me what you found.