The Varsity Theatre marquee stands above the entrance to the longtime Franklin Street cinema in Chapel Hill, Friday, Oct. 22, 2025. Photo by Jinrui Liu.
Audio by Jinrui Liu
Narrator: In the age of Netflix and Hulu, the movie theater feels almost nostalgic.
But on UNC’s campus and beyond, students, scholars, and small-town theaters are still asking:
what happens to the cinema experience when the screen fits in the palm of your hand?
Meet Carrington Bostic — a UNC senior with a concentration in Film Studies. She reflects on how streaming has reshaped how people watch film.
Carrington Bostic: you can easily like be scrolling and playing Candy Crush while watching a movie or just kind of tuning it out.
Narrator: She says that convenience comes with a cost — focus, and attention.
Carrington Bostic: People will be excited to sit down and watch a 10-hour episode episode episode then watch a whole show… Thinking about people sitting in a theater for two hours whenever you ask someone to go see a two-hour long film with you.
Narrator: At The Lumina Theater in Southern Village, the owner explains how COVID accelerated a transformation long in motion.
Lumina Theater Owner: Because during the pandemic, it allowed the studios to accelerate to a streaming platform that they had been wanting to play with the Windows for a very long time, the amount of time between when a film is released and you know in a theater and then when it’s allowed to be whether it’s pay-per-view or DVD or whatever the format is.
Owner: I hate to say too many nice things about Netflix, but at the same time, they’ve done a really good job with original programming and I think it’s partly because blockbuster film, the budget on it can be 100, 200, 300 million dollars and the studios want a green light of product of IP that is well known and and guaranteed like they don’t want to take any chances.
Narrator: For theater owners like Lumina’s, adaptation means reinvestment — and reinvention.
Owner: let’s bring back old movies. Let’s play not just films like the Taylor Swift concert this week. It’s not really a concert this weekend. It’s a launch of a record, so we’re playing a couple of old Robert Redford films since he passed away this past week
we try to bring in other types of films sometimes we play some anime. It’s not just movies but it’s all forms of entertainment.
Narrator: For Prof. Johnson, the cycle of fear and innovation is nothing new.
Professor Martin Johnson: One of my favorite stories is in the late 1920s when sound was coming in, that kind of caused a lot of economic constraint. There was also a wave of interest in like putt-putt mini golf. There are some examples of people even converting movie theaters to mini golf places so there’s like a long been this kind of like fear, and so streaming is just kind of the latest and the long line kind of threats to the movie theater industry.
Narrator: Both agree that streaming’s business model still struggles to replace what theaters offer.
Professor Martin Johnson: Economics are a little bit different because if you’re Netflix, what you want to do is a. make sure people don’t quit your subscription and then b. sign some new people.
Owner: it was over two and a half billion dollars’ worth of reinvestment in the US alone. My history I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Little Synagogue show over at Waverly which is in Cary. I opened that theater over 10 years ago. That’s a very popular experience where it’s food and beverage served to your seat with wait service and all that.
Narrator: This is Jinrui Liu reporting.
