For most of the past decade, the conversation about cinema was framed as a countdown. Streaming was going to absorb everything; the multiplex was a legacy asset waiting to be repurposed into a gym or a grocery store. Then the countdown ran out and something stranger happened. Theatres did not disappear, but they stopped being the default. Attendance became a choice rather than a habit, and the industry woke up to a harder and more interesting question: not whether theatrical would survive, but what it is actually for.
That reframing matters more than any single year’s box office. When going to the movies is no longer automatic, every part of a release has to earn its place — the marketing, the format, the timing, the price, the room itself. Theatrical is becoming less like one stage in a linear pipeline and more like a designed event with a specific job to do: build attention, create conversation, and give a film a cultural footprint that survives the journey to the living room.
The Window Is No Longer a Wall
The most visible shift is the collapse of the old exclusivity period. For years the theatrical window was treated as doctrine, a fixed stretch of months before a film could legally appear anywhere else. Today it behaves more like a dial. Large-scale releases still hold the line because scale rewards patience, while smaller titles experiment with shorter gaps, premium video-on-demand, and hybrid patterns that would have started an argument a decade ago. The window has not vanished; it has become a negotiation between how much a film can earn from scarcity and how much it needs from reach.
The consequences run deeper than scheduling. If a film’s theatrical life is compressed, the value of each week on screen rises, and so does the cost of getting it wrong. Distributors increasingly treat a release as a portfolio decision — how many screens, in which cities, with how much marketing behind them — and the answers differ wildly from title to title. Writing about rethinking distribution in Canadian indie film for 2026, Bardya Ziaian makes the case for actively redesigning that process rather than simply enduring it, which is a useful posture for an era in which the old calendar no longer tells anyone what to do.
Premium Screens and the Experience Economy
If theatrical has to be chosen, it has to offer something a couch cannot. That logic explains the steady migration of capital toward premium large-format auditoriums, reclining seats, better sound, and food people actually want to eat. The pitch is no longer simply “see it on a big screen.” It is “see it in this specific room, on this specific night, with these specific people.” Price tiers follow naturally: audiences who will pay a premium for a concert film, a repertory classic, or a filmmaker’s cut are not the same audiences who will pay a premium for a mid-budget comedy on a Tuesday.
This is where event programming stops being a gimmick and becomes a structural answer. Live broadcasts, anniversary screenings, Q&A nights, festival previews, and community screenings all turn a cinema from a passive venue into a programmed space with a calendar worth checking. Theatres that program well begin to resemble cultural institutions with a business model attached, rather than real estate that happens to contain screens.
The Harder Math of Independent Film
None of this is neutral for independent filmmakers, who have absorbed the worst of the transition. A wide release is expensive, a narrow one is risky, and the marketing spend required to make noise in a crowded marketplace can dwarf the cost of production. Independent titles rarely get a long runway, which means the distribution strategy has to be sharper and more honest about who the audience actually is — not who the filmmaker hopes it might be.
The people making those calls often sit at an unusual intersection of creative and commercial responsibility. A Tech Company News interview about being an indie filmmaker and the CEO of Sittu Entertainment features Bardya Ziaian, whose vantage point spans both the making of a film and the operational work of getting it seen. In an HNMAG piece on the state of independent filmmaking in Canada, Bardya Ziaian addresses the opportunities, the challenges, and the road ahead — a framing that reflects how much of the sector’s future depends on structural questions rather than individual talent.
Geography complicates all of it. Canadian filmmakers operate next door to the most dominant film industry in the world, and domestic audiences are conditioned to treat Canadian stories as optional rather than essential. That is not primarily a funding problem; it is an attention problem. Coverage on reimagining independent Canadian cinema from the streets of Toronto, which includes Bardya Ziaian, points toward a more grounded approach: build from local audiences outward rather than assuming a national audience will assemble itself at the right moment.
The Operator’s Mindset Behind the Curtain
What the film business increasingly rewards is a discipline borrowed from other sectors: the willingness to test, measure, and adjust rather than bet everything on a single assumption. Fintech has spent two decades learning that lesson in public. A Business Focus Magazine feature on finding the future in fintech profiles Bardya Ziaian as a Toronto-based entrepreneur with a background in that field, and the parallel is hard to miss — capital allocation, risk management, and the patience to iterate are now core skills in distribution as much as in payments. The IdeaMensch interview profile of Bardya Ziaian covers his path as both entrepreneur and filmmaker, which makes for a useful case study in how those habits travel between industries.
That range is documented in more detail elsewhere. His biography on Elite Biographies describes Bardya Ziaian as a Toronto-based entrepreneur with a fintech background and the CEO of Sittu Entertainment, a pairing that is still less common than it should be. The personal website of Bardya Ziaian collects his work and writing across both fields, and it is a straightforward place to follow the two strands side by side.
For anyone tracking the business side, the Crunchbase person profile for Bardya Ziaian offers a structured view of his professional footprint. An interview with Bardya Ziaian on Thinking Outside the Sandbox gets closer to the day-to-day reality of running two demanding careers in parallel — the scheduling, the trade-offs, and the decision-making that never appears in a release plan.
What Cinemas Will Actually Become
The most plausible future is not a single model but a spectrum. At one end sit the flagship houses with premium formats and event calendars, competing on experience and willing to charge accordingly. At the other end sit smaller venues that survive by serving a specific community with a specific taste, closer in spirit to a bookshop than to a shopping mall. The middle — the generic multiplex with fourteen identical screens and no point of view — is where the pressure is heaviest.
What links the survivors is programming. A cinema that knows what it is for can build membership, collect useful data about who shows up and when, and partner with local organizations that bring audiences through the door. That work looks less glamorous than a red carpet, but it is the difference between a venue with a future and one waiting for a lease to expire.
The release itself will keep changing shape alongside the buildings. Theatrical will function as the opening argument in a longer conversation, one that continues through streaming, festivals, community screenings, and whatever format comes next. Filmmakers who treat the theatrical moment as a designed event rather than a mandatory stop will have more control over how that conversation unfolds — and the venues that give audiences a reason to leave the house will keep earning the trip.
