Family Movie Graveyard

We don’t take the kids to the movies much. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that there simply aren’t a lot of movies we can agree on as a family. Now, part of that is that the eight-year-old still has the tastes of an eight-year-old, and I genuinely made her father go with her to the birthday party where they went to see Sonic 3 in the theatre—and he spent most of it in the back row messing around on his phone. But a lot of it is that movies that might appeal to the kids are more likely to go to streaming than to the theatre, and even there we don’t have a ton of new options.

Granted, not all the options I saw in the theatre as a child were new; I grew up when Disney would rerelease things from the Vault every seven years or so and send them into theatres. The first movie I remember seeing at an inside theatre, as opposed to the drive-in we still frequented in the early ‘80s, was Cinderella. The winter after I turned eight, my mom took me, my sisters, and a couple of my friends to see Fantasia on the big screen, an opportunity my own children have not had. Every year, you’d have at least one option. Heck, I’ve written about the time I saw Song of the South, not that I’d take my own kids to see Song of the South.

But the summer I was eight, MTV was playing “Good Enough,” the Goonies song by Cyndi Lauper, on steady rotation, not that I saw the movie until I was older. We did, however, see Return to Oz and D.A.R.Y.L. Another “and boy did I hear that song on MTV a lot” was Ghostbusters. I had friends who were still interested in The Care Bear Movie. Disney’s interesting failure The Black Cauldron was that year, and Follow That Bird for little kids and Gremlins for older ones. Back to the Future came out that year, and while that’s more of a family movie than a kids’ movie, there were still family movies in those days.

Oh, there are ten AM weekday screenings at my local theatre of slightly older movies, if only slightly; this morning, we could watch Paw Patrol: The Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. There’s also Elio. But it’s becoming clear to me that the reason those screenings of the two live-action remakes playing at my theatre will be full of families is that, really, what else are they going to see? Ballerina? I grant you at least one of the movies I mentioned above would’ve been PG-13 if PG-13 had existed in the summer of 1985, but my theatre’s got to be playing the new Jurassic World on at least four screens.

We’re still not taking the kids to the remakes. It’s a moral stance on my point and a total lack of interest on my partner’s, and the kids aren’t terribly upset on the subject. But it seems likely to me that at least half the appeal of those movies to a lot of parents is that they’re movies they’re willing to take their kids to. Doubtless some kids are trying to persuade their parents to take them to M3GAN 2.0, and I bet my basically-twelve-year-old son’s thirteen-year-old friend wants to see 28 Years Later, but I’m not sure even he cares about the new Mission Impossible. Definitely not F1.