On Friday, December 5, Netflix agreed to pay $72 billion to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Warner Bros. is one of the major American film and entertainment companies most known for producing iconic television shows and movies, with famous shows such as ‘Friends” and “Big Bang Theory,” and movies like Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy and the “Harry Potter” series. 

These films and shows are meaningful to a large audience, and the movies are special to people because they remember the experiences they had seeing the films in theaters.

“Going to the movie theater is a key part of a lot of memories,” junior Mason Jessie said.

Jessie also explained how he opposes the purchasing of Warner Bros. by Netflix, saying “I love going to the movies, and with no movies going to the cinema all we’re going to have to watch is random Netflix slop.”

The worry that films and other types of screen media will worsen in quality because of the shift to digital streaming is becoming more and more prevalent as these streaming sites remove films from the theater, with Netflix choosing to have limited theater releases for several recent and upcoming films, most notably “Frankenstein” and “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.” 

The CEO of Netflix, Ted Sarandos, expressed how he believes this is good for the greater cinematic industry, saying “There’s no reason to believe that the movie itself is better in any size of screen for all people. My son’s an editor, he watched ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ on his phone.” He also described how he believed the films “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” would have performed “just as well” on Netflix as they did in the box office. These movies grossed a combined total in the box office of over $2.4 Billion, and if they were released on Netflix, there would not have been as significant an event that is referred to as “Barbenheimer,” one of the best and most significant box office experiences in cinema history.

“There is easily a difference between seeing it in the cinema versus just at home or on a device. There’s something about that screen where it’s like blinding, you know? It just does so much more, like even like a Star Wars movie. I grew up watching “Phantom Menace” on VHS, but then I went to a theater and I watched it and it was just a better movie,” senior Jacob King said.

There is a noticeable difference between just watching on a phone or computer screen compared to watching in the cinema, with senior Grace Tadlock describing her appreciation for the “surround sound and big screen.” Tadlock also expressed how “seeing movies in the theater [is] an amazing experience all around,” and “there is a movie for everyone.”

“The communal experience that is historically associated with films, from drive-in theaters to Letterboxd, makes movies what they are, which is something that everyone should be able to enjoy. “It’s fully an experience rather than just pure media,” King said.

“[Letterboxd] is definitely for me… it feels like a competition almost, but not even with other people. It feels like when you’re watching a movie, you’re doing something for yourself,” King said. Letterboxd is a movie rating app that has been associated with adding to the community-like feeling of watching movies, especially with going to the theater becoming less and less prevalent. King, an avid Letterboxd user (@jiglejake), has logged over 450 films on the app, with 190 being in this calendar year. He expressed how “It’s also something about how you feel like you’re part of more of a community, especially with theaters sort of falling out of style and movies becoming less of a communal experience, it sort of returns a sort of feeling of that communal thing, where you can see and review a new movie and then immediately see everybody’s thoughts on it in a pretty clear, concise way.”

What Letterboxd seems to offer is what Netflix wants to take away– the feeling that everyone belongs somewhere and that everyone can collaborate to share what they feel.