Like a first kiss, most people don’t forget the first movie they saw in a theater.
Nothing to do with the movie industry in 2020 is normal. Movie studios are hedging their bets – delaying the vast majority of big budget movies (such as “Jungle Cruise,” “West Side Story,” “Fast & Furious 9,” and “Deep Water”) for more than a year, and releasing others such as “Hamilton” and “Mulan” via streaming. Some, like Paramount, are selling their titles — “The Trial of the Chicago 7″ and “The Lovebirds” — to Netflix. Warner Bros. took a chance and released ‘Tenet” in theaters that were open, replete with social distancing mandates (which in Massachusetts requires theater owners to sell a maximum of 25 tickets per auditorium and no concessions). The results were so disastrous that the studio delayed “Wonder Woman 1984” again, and Disney took “Black Widow” off the 2020 release schedule. There is no telling when most movie lovers will want to go back to theaters, or when studios will next release a big budget film in theaters.
That’s why we asked over two dozen celebrities with local ties to tell us their earliest memory of seeing a movie in a theater.