与其他针对较旧人群的电影相比“唐顿修道院：一个新时代”has done fairly well at the box office, making $82 million worldwide, a little less than half of what the pre-pandemic “Downton Abbey” of 2019 earned. Considering that sequels rarely match the performance of the original, this qualified success is being seen as indication that older people are going back to the movies.

Theater owners have feared that older audiences — people age 40 and older — that stayed away because of the pandemic got out of the habit of moviegoing. Over the course of 2021, according to a Gallup poll, 18- to 30-year-olds went back to the theaters, but only half as many did in the 30-49 range, a third as many in the 50-64 range and a sixth as many in the over-65 group. But “Downton Abbey: A New Era” shows that at least for something special ⁠—“Top Gun: Maverick,”这继续吸引各个一代的观众，也有资格⁠ - 年长的观众愿意购买门票并与公众观看电影。

Still, questions remain as tohowspecial a movie has to be, and whether “Downton Abbey’s” success may be a one-off or a sign that movie theater attendance will begin to return to pre-pandemic levels.

I realize that, as a film critic, I’m supposed to be bullish on movie attendance, and I am with regard to younger people. Nothing is going to keep teenagers away from a superhero blockbuster. For example, this year’s “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” has already brought in more revenue than the original “Doctor Strange” from 2016.

但是我的猜测是，一定比例的年长观众永远失去了多重的观众。由于我以后会解释，我认为他们不会迷失于曲目房屋。但是，倍增器不会使它们恢复，我怀疑他们会非常努力地做到这一点。

I came to this conclusion by asking myself a question: Why did mature audiences ever go to the movies in the first place? Here are some answers:

• They went to see something new that they couldn’t see elsewhere. Now, though, movies are available in our homes, often streaming on the same day as their theatrical release. Even when they’re not, they become available to stream much sooner than they ever did in the past.
  据《商业内部人士》报道，在流行前时代，电影发行后75至100天开始流式传输。今天，平均等待时间仅为45天。
• They went to have a sensory experience that they never could get at home. These days, the technological gap between the home theater and the real theater is not that great.
  除非电影是“ Top Gun：Maverick”之类的巨大内容，否则大型主屏幕和不错的音响系统可以为您提供对剧院体验的公平模拟。老年人往往比年轻人拥有更多的可支配收入，并且可以进行必要的升级。
  有趣的是，去年下半年的哈里斯民意调查表明，尽管公共笑声是喜剧电影体验的重要组成部分，但大多数人甚至更喜欢在家看喜剧。
• 他们在约会时去看电影。Butlots of older people are in relationships — and the single ones who are dating probably prefer going out to dinner or to a musical theater performance rather than the movies.
  I have no data to support this conclusion, except my own conviction that if I were single and on a date, the last absolute last place I’d want to go — assuming I actually wanted to make a decent impression — is a noisy movie theater, packed with teenagers and, possibly, omicron.
• 他们出去寻找一种社区感觉，您无法进入客厅。但是，您也不会从客厅中一个完全陌生的人那里得到互相。像我们许多人一样，当这些天老年人去电影院看很多空座位时，他们并不觉得自己走进了一个悲伤的聚会。他们感到放心。

以这种方式看，成熟的电影剧院观众已经被一条线程挂了 - Covid削减了线程。到目前为止，这是一个比2019年更了解流媒体的人群。

Something else, too: When I was a teenager, on those rare occasions when I went to the movies, I’d feel as though I was entering an adult sanctum. This was the 1970s, when the movies being made were mainly for grown-ups.

But starting with “Star Wars” in 1977, and increasingly over the ensuing decades, movies have become a young person’s game, and the moviegoing experience has been recalibrated with young people’s tolerance for noise and discomfort in mind.

I’m sheltered from the worst of this, because I mainly attend special media screenings, but every time I see a movie at a regular screening on a Saturday night, I’m astonished by the sensory bombardment: Forty minutes of loud advertisements, not just for upcoming movies, but for idiotic TV shows and consumer products. A movie has to be pretty amazing to counteract the sheer misery of the physical experience.

当然，如果您年轻并且已经习惯了，那么看电影的方式似乎很自然。但是，如果您不习惯它，您可以走出自己的殴打并想：“就是这样。再也不。”

Repertory houses, by comparison, aren’t like that. There are few trailers, no advertisements, and you don’t have half the audience on their cell phones. You’re not usually sitting elbow to elbow, and often the programming is genuinely rare. Take for example, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s recent tribute to the Hungarian director Márta Mészáros. Those movies were almost entirely otherwise unavailable. For those reasons, I hope and expect that older audiences will return to them as soon as it feels safe.

同时，出现了另一个问题：失去年长的观众会影响制作的电影类型吗？

在这里，我很乐观。即使他们不像以前那样去看电影，我相信成熟的观众将通过在Prime Video，Netflix和其他流媒体平台（包括高级平台）上观看优质电影。他们没有放弃电影，只是多重。

但实际上，我们将不知道再过一两年的这些问题的全部答案。