With theaters shuttered, virtual cinema has saved the day. For now. – Media | Cinema

When Tom Quinn and Tim League formed the film company Neon in 2017, they shared at least one mission: Even as Hollywood was being upended by the streaming giant Netflix and questions regarding the viability of bricks-and-mortar movie venues, they vowed that their films would always play in theaters.

“We built our whole business on the power of cinema in theater,” Quinn said recently by phone, noting that League is the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse chain. “That’s everything to us, it’s everything that we’ve put into our release strategies, it determines every film that we buy.”

Neon’s biggest breakthrough to date — Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” which won best picture and best international feature film at the Oscars this year — exemplified Quinn’s philosophy of filmgoing, which means “the communal experience of going to a theater and committing yourself to a filmmaker’s vision wholeheartedly for one or two hours with no breaks.” So when most American theaters closed in March, just as Neon was preparing to release its Sundance acquisition “Spaceship Earth,” Quinn faced an existential quandary.