Eoin, you ignorant slut.

Man, I’ve wanted to say that in an article professionally ever since I saw Dan Aykroyd do it to Jane Curtin on Saturday Night Live’s early Weekend Update shorts.

But fun with throwbacks aside, I’ve had the chance to read Eoin’s piece (naturally we wrote this all ahead of time so we could reason out points and counterpoints and whatnot, giving you the best possible argument without us actually going to Thunderdome over it) and he’s just sailed right on past the point.  And thus I get my opening salvo.

The future of cinema, ladies and gentlemen, is not in the theaters.

The future is at home.

Yes, Eoin glibly mentions how darned affordable home theater gear is getting (though he really doesn’t go far enough–you can get a decent LCD projector on eBay for about three hundred bucks right now, less if you shop carefully, and that’ll jack you up past a HUNDRED INCH SCREEN.  A hundred inches.  That’s just over an eight foot diagonal.  The only way you’ll get bigger is to go to the movies themselves, and even then it’s a narrow win for theaters.)

But folks, we all know what the economy’s like out there. Lots of people don’t have jobs.  Those who DO have jobs live in perpetual fear of losing them.  And most everybody is watching their pennies the way a hawk stares at a warren of fuzzy bunnies.

Yes, some will tell you the box office never had a better year.  But what those same people will fail to mention is what part of that is attributed to IMAX tickets that cost substantially more than the ordinary, and outright price increases at the regular theaters.  When you factor those particular items out of the equation, suddenly the picture isn’t so rosy for the “theater experience”.

And consider the savings!  Yes, you could take those few pounds / dollars / Euros / yen / yuan / shiny rocks and sticks to the theater, and get away from it all for a couple hours, but for the price of a couple hundred of those outings, consider how much better it would be to have that getaway ANY TIME YOU WANT IT, and not have to leave the house to get it.  Just go down into your basement, or your spare room, shut the door, and have that movie getaway any time, day or night.  Imagine the sheer decadence of declaring all day Saturday to be “movie day”, and watching movies nonstop, like a chain smoker in a tobacco plantation, one right after the next.

Imagine never having to fork over cash to that smug little prick behind the ticket counter EVER AGAIN.

And you can do it for a whole lot less disposable income than you may have thought possible.  Between eBay and Craigslist and sheer do-it-yourselfism, you too can make a theater for your very own.  Publications all over the place will show you what you can do.  An hour on YouTube will give you more ideas than you knew existed!

So if you want to REALLY save money, skip the theater.  Make your OWN instead.