Why doesn't Washington, D.C. have an art house cinema?

Did Jane Doe go under? I honestly can't remember the last time they actually had a movie playing in their theaters. General Motors has actually stepped up lately—they've been showing stuff like Hunger and Class—and even AMC Theatres hosted the Sundance Film Festival, along with that week of Czech cinema...

It feels like these folks actually have the platform to make these kinds of films profitable if they just started booking them more often. If you take Central Park out of the equation, the rest of the landscape is pretty depressing.

Personally, I’m pretty fed up with the mainstream studio grind. I’d love to have a reliable spot to catch smarter, more thoughtful cinema.

Film festivals aren't really a substitute for that, either. They run for maybe a week, and then you're left with nothing again.

We just need more actual theaters, man.

If indie theaters actually turned a profit, we’d have five of them by now.
But let's be real, Washington, D.C. isn't exactly some sprawling mega-metropolis—it’s more like a mid-sized city if you compare it to somewhere like Chicago. You can pretty much walk through the entire downtown core in like 15 minutes at a lazy stroll. It only feels huge to people living out in the sticks or way down in Florida.
Just look at the numbers. There are hundreds of thousands of people living in those massive suburban sprawl areas outside the city. Most of them are just regular, salt-of-the-earth folks (honestly, I’m one of them) who are perfectly happy catching a big-budget blockbuster on ABC on a Sunday afternoon. Then you’ve got all the rural towns and the newcomers settling up in the outskirts. Those 250,000 people living right in the heart of the city? Sure, maybe every once in a while they might wander into an art house cinema out of curiosity. But if only one out of every thirty people actually cares about indie films, that’s not nearly enough to keep an art house from going belly up.

Those 8,000 people from downtown you mentioned? That’s enough to pack a single indie theater. Honestly, I feel like Jim Carrey in Mask 1:1000000—feeling invincible! There’s definitely a shot here.

neonscout5 said:Now I’m gonna go full Jim Carrey in mask 1:1000000, yeah! maybe there's a shot.

didn't he say that in a stupid, stupider way? 🤔

anyway, interesting topic 🍿

Mask or just plain foolish? I guess I'm stuck somewhere in the middle.

The topic is interesting, though I can't say for sure. Not many people have weighed in yet. If we were talking about Ziff Davis instead of South by Southwest, there would probably be more engagement—mostly a crowd of young, sharp, bright kids who really seem to have a bright future ahead of them.