I am not watching a movie on streaming so let's start there...

Crying with strangers in Hamnet.

Hi everyone. It’s been a big week at Beating A Dead Horse HQ over here, discussing every angle of the WB x Netflix x Paramount situation. First of all I didn’t want to ever have an opinion on a “hostile takeover” if it didn’t involve the names Kendall Roy and Stewy Hosseini. I’m not any type of authority on news about this, Richard Rushfield on The Ankler is who I go to to make sense of what’s going on, as well as Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast when I’m driving. But no matter which annoying option prevails in acquiring Warner Bros, I don’t actually think it will mean the end of movie theaters, simply because it can’t. Movie theaters are too important for the culture to be allowed to go extinct. What’s next, we’ll let Them shut all restaurants down so Doordash can thrive? That’s not an option that’s on the table so we will all have to internalize that and go from there.

The easiest thing we can all do to preserve the culture of moviegoing against all streaming CEOs is to become more annoying and talk about the value in going to the movies all the time. To illustrate that today I will recount my experience seeing (/sobbing through) Hamnet. I saw this on a two-show day that started with a matinee of Jay Kelly (where Nancy Meyers came out to interview Noah Baumbach and grilled him for ten minutes about his rule of no chairs on sets). Jay Kelly ended roughly 15 minutes before Hamnet started at a theater thankfully 5 minutes away, and with the added time of navigating both parking lots, I sat down about a minute before Jessie Buckley first appeared on screen.

Hamnet dir. Chloé Zhao (Focus Features)