The Guild Hall

Netflix, Ritual, and the Return of the Shared Room.

The LA Times covered Netflix’s limited run of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein—ten theaters, three weeks, awards buzz, talent relations, the usual calculus. That read isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. Buried in the piece is the real tell: at least 57 sold-out screenings in the first weekend. That’s not just campaign mechanics; that’s ceremony showing up on a schedule.

Netflix can call theatrical “outdated” and still need it more every year. Not for windows or trophies, but for something streaming can’t host: ritual. On phones, choice is infinite and private; in a theater, scarcity is public and shared. That difference matters most to the youngest audiences, because affiliation needs a room. You can be a fan on your For You page; you become one when other people see you be it.

Frankenstein makes the point obvious. A three-week engagement looks tactical—qualify for Oscars, please talent, make noise. But the sold-out rooms are the meaningful artifact: proof of presence. The timestamp is social, not technical. That’s ritual: show up, witness, return. Streaming scales delivery; theaters scale belonging.

Older generations learned to meet in the same places at the same times—youth sports, weeknight services, Friday shows. Gen A is bluntly post-broadcast: their calendars are personalized, their friendships are group chats, their feeds are sovereign. What they lack is a dependable, legible moment that says we were here together. A theater can do that without trying very hard. Tickets are appointments. Rooms are cohorts. Laughter and gasps synchronize bodies in a way an algorithm can’t. The point is not exclusivity; it’s co-presence. Ritual is simply repetition given meaning, and theaters are machines for meaning because you cannot pause what’s happening and you cannot prove you were there without leaving your house to do it.

This doesn’t make every release a “community event.” It doesn’t have to. The ritual is the constant; the title is the variable. Some weeks the movie brings the crowd; some weeks the crowd brings the movie. What matters is that there’s a place to bring it to. When the LA Times reads Frankenstein as strategy-lite—awards and talent—what looks like hedging from Netflix is actually gravity. Platforms chased total convenience; the cost was losing the places where fandom becomes visible to itself. As attention gets cheaper, ceremony gets expensive—and therefore valuable.

People keep confusing the Oscar race with strategy. Awards are tactics; ritual is infrastructure. Teens don’t return for prestige; they return for belonging. A multiplex at 7:10 p.m. on a Friday is one of the last widely acceptable rooms where fourteen-year-olds can go with friends, be slightly unsupervised, and feel like the night belongs to them. That is not an “experience layer” you bolt onto streaming. That’s the whole product for a generation taught to measure themselves by what sticks, not what scrolls by.

The bet isn’t that theaters replace the small screen. The bet is that the small screen can’t finish the job. Affiliation requires witnesses. Ritual requires a clock. Return requires a reason beyond novelty. Theaters supply all three, quietly, the way they always did—only now their utility is clearer because everything else is louder. If you want a single sentence that the LA Times piece gestures at but doesn’t say: it’s not that the window works; it’s that the room does.

Gen A will not be argued into caring about cinema. They will see each other caring, in public, at the same time, often enough that it becomes part of who they are. That’s not nostalgia. That’s infrastructure.