Photo by Jimmy Baikovicius/Flickr
Audio By Carbonatix
Sunday was a perfect afternoon to go to the movies. The never-ending September rain put a stop to any outdoor activities, and the Dolphins weren’t playing football until Monday night. But there was also a special urgency to get to my local theater: After 26 years in business, the Regal South Beach was screening its final movies that night.
The colorful multiplex opened on June 16, 1999, when Lincoln Road bustled with diverse entertainment options. Back then, you had your choice of seeing live jazz upstairs at Van Dyke Cafe, shopping for your next read at Books & Books, or even seeing an art film at Alliance Cinema. At the end of the open-air mall off Alton Road was the anchor and crown jewel: an 18-screen movie theater that showed the best and worst Hollywood had to offer, all while saving a screen or two for smaller, independent, and foreign films.
For many years, it all went according to plan. If you wanted to see the newest Spider-Man or Pedro Almodovar movie on opening weekend, you had to get there early, or you’d have to sit in the front row. In the mid-2010s, when streaming began to take hold, Regal upgraded five VIP theaters with cushy, reclining seats and a full-service bar.
But Netflix eventually colonized phones and tablets, and later, COVID kept people at home. In early 2023, Regal Cinemas announced it would close 39 theaters, including its South Beach location. Miraculously, the chain backtracked and kept its Lincoln Road theater open beyond the rumored February 15, 2023, closing date. I told myself I wouldn’t take the luxury of being able to walk to the movies for granted. I’d go once a week and enjoy the communal entertainment that only a movie theater can provide. Others in Miami Beach seemed to feel the same way: I remember going on a weeknight in the summer of 2023, when Barbie and Oppenheimer duked it out at the box office, and there wasn’t a seat available for either movie.
But my once-a-week theatergoing habit reverted back to once a month or less, with others apparently following suit. In mid-September, the city of Miami Beach approved a plan to replace the theater with the immersive Superhuman Museum, which will pair experiential exhibitions with works by artists like Picasso and Warhol.
The Last Weekend
The theater didn’t look much different from how it did on my last visit. The first-floor box office window had been closed since the pandemic. One escalator had yellow caution tape over it, while the working escalator had an audible squeak. The most tragic indications of the closure were the posters for upcoming movies the theater would never show. There was one for Zootopia 2, set to come out at Thanksgiving. Then there was the new Channing Tatum movie, Roofman, scheduled to be released in two weeks. It seemed like a formula for a Pixar tearjerker, but instead of toys that a child had outgrown, they were displays for films that would never be seen here.
The second floor was a ghost town. I walked up to the concession stand to buy my movie ticket. I asked the employee if today was really the last day they’d screen movies. “This is it,” he said. He’d only been working there a few months. I asked what he was going to do. “I don’t know. I might go back into security.” I bought a ticket to see the new Leonardo DiCaprio movie, One Battle After Another, and got a too-big tub of popcorn that no doctor would recommend finishing.
It was playing in one of those VIP theaters where the seats lean back with little attached desks. I got there ten minutes early to soak it all in, but the lights were already dimmed for commercials. This is a common complaint about modern moviegoing: the trailers go on forever. The feature at my 2:45 p.m. screening didn’t begin until 3:15 p.m., but I was glad it gave latecomers time to find their seats. We were in this together.
A Communal Experience
One Battle After Another was as good as the critics said — maybe even better. I was so glad I got to see it in a theater. When a character met a surprising demise, the woman behind me let out an audible gasp of shock. When Benicio del Toro quipped a funny one-liner, the audience’s laughs fed upon one another.
Now that the Regal has closed, I’ll have to drive — no more walking to the movies — to get that experience. There’s still O Cinema, which the citizens of South Florida fought to keep open in March amid a dispute with Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner. But for an island with more than 80,000 people, a single screen with 80 seats is fairly limited, and the nonprofit theater focuses on indie and arthouse films, rather than blockbusters.
That trend appears to be spilling over onto the mainland, too. With Sunset Place scheduled for demolition in the next few months, the fate of the Shops’ AMC Theater is not yet confirmed, but it doesn’t bode well. I suppose it’s the evolution of our species — staring at screens used to be a communal event, now it’s a more private activity.
Which brings me back to the ending of One Battle After Another. I didn’t particularly care for the final scene, but like the best movies, the ending seemed uncannily relevant to what I was currently experiencing. The protagonist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, spent the beginning of the movie as a revolutionary fighting against the injustices of the world. He gives it all up to care for the most important person in his life, which he eventually has to rescue from the worst person in the world. After two-and-a-half hours of constant running and fighting and adrenaline, we get to an ending. And where do we leave our revolutionary before the credits roll? Suffice it to say, he looks a lot like the rest of us do on the couch, without someone to reflect our laughter back at us.
