When the Lights Went Out

🎬 When the Lights Went Out

How Digital “Saved” the Movies by Killing the Theaters

Note: Technical terms like “DCP” (Digital Cinema Package) and “DRM” (Digital Rights Management) are briefly explained in context throughout this piece.

I’d been wondering what happened to the movies — why my local theater looked so run down and why we only have two major theaters left in the city. What I found out was bigger than one neglected building. The problem wasn’t just poor upkeep, or even the pandemic — it went deeper, down to the way modern projection works, and how Hollywood itself helped break the business model that once kept theaters alive.

For years, I assumed COVID was to blame. It seemed obvious: audiences vanished, box offices crashed, and the industry never fully recovered. But the truth is, the pandemic didn’t kill the movies. It just finished the job. The system was already bleeding out from self-inflicted wounds long before 2020.

The First Light

I don’t remember much about my hometown theater — just that it had one screen, a simple marquee, and the same old projector it probably had since the day it opened in the late 1940s.

That’s where I saw Star Wars, Tron, E.T. and so many others I do not recall anymore. I couldn’t tell you what the seats looked like or whether the sound was any good, but I remember the glow filling the dark room and the hum of the projector behind me, while a story came to life on a screen larger than life.

In a small town, everybody knew everybody. Everybody also knew the Tope family owned and ran the theater. They sold the tickets, ran the projector, and probably swept the floors afterward. Everybody knew them — and it says something that after all these years, I still remember their name.

It wasn’t fancy, but it didn’t need to be. As long as the projector worked, you could keep the doors open.

That was the beauty of it — almost anyone could own a theater. You didn’t need a digital certificate, a decryption key, or a studio contract. You just needed a working machine, a film print, and an audience willing to show up.

The Great Digital Promise

The studios called it progress: perfect pictures, no scratches, cheaper shipping. Every theater had to “go digital” or be left behind. It sounded like modernization — but the fine print said something else.

Inside every new projector was a lock. Each movie came as an encrypted file (called a Digital Cinema Package, or DCP — essentially a hard drive with the film on it) that only a specific projector could play, only during a specific time window, and only if a studio-issued key said so.

Theaters didn’t just buy new projectors. They bought handcuffs made of aluminum and firmware.

The DRM Trap

Old projectors were mechanical marvels. A 1950s Simplex or Century could run for fifty years with grease and belts. A skilled projectionist could fix one with a wrench.

The new machines? Encrypted computers in sealed boxes — locked down by Digital Rights Management (DRM), the same kind of copy protection used by Netflix or Apple Music, only far stricter.

You can’t run a community short film on them.
You can’t test-screen your own trailer.
You can’t even play a cat video — literally. Unless it’s wrapped, signed, and blessed by the studios, the projector won’t light up.

And when the internal clock drifts or a license expires, the screen stays black. The world’s most advanced image device becomes a brick until Los Angeles emails a new key.

The Two-Projector Problem

Here’s the part nobody outside the business realizes: most theaters now need two projectors.

One runs encrypted, studio-approved content — the only thing the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) spec allows that machine to play. The other exists just so the theater can show anything else: local ads, indie films, PowerPoint slides, even a charity fundraiser video.

So the “upgrade” that was supposed to modernize everything actually doubled the equipment bill. Instead of one reliable machine that could do it all, theaters had to buy a six-figure fortress for Hollywood and a second, normal projector for everyone else.

It’s ridiculous — the digital equivalent of buying a second piano just to play your own songs.

The Analog Hole

And the funniest part? After all this money, all the rules and locks and “security protocols,” the system still isn’t foolproof.

In digital-rights circles they have a name for it: the analog hole. If you can see it or hear it, you can record it. Period.

So a theater can project a fully encrypted, studio-approved digital file on a six-figure projector… and somebody can still film it with a camera. All that DRM, all that encryption, and piracy still slips right through the front row.

Theaters can’t play their own content, but bootleggers can. That’s the punchline nobody talks about — the system was never about stopping piracy. It was about control.

No Going Back

And here’s the sad part: we can’t go back now, even if we wanted to.

Most theaters sold off their film gear years ago — projectors, platters, splicers, everything. The labs that printed 35 mm and 70 mm reels are mostly gone too. Even if a community wanted to bring back film, the supply chain’s been dismantled.

Digital wasn’t just an upgrade; it was a one-way door. Once you walked through it, the old world vanished.

Where the Projectors Went

When theaters switched to digital, all that beautiful, heavy machinery had to go somewhere.

The big chains sold it for scrap. Entire projection booths — Simplex and Century machines that had been running since the ’50s — were hauled away by the truckload. Some were stripped for metal, others left to rust in storage rooms that used to echo with the sound of film spinning.

The independents tried to hang on. A few boxed up their projectors “just in case,” hoping film might come back. It never did. Today, some of those machines are still sitting in basements and back rooms, quietly waiting for a world that no longer exists.

The lucky ones found new life. Collectors, archivists, and a handful of revival theaters bought what they could, cleaned them up, and kept them running. The Artcraft Theatre in Franklin, Cleveland Cinematheque, and IU Cinema all project real 35 mm to this day — often using machines rescued from the digital purge.

The rest? Gone. The labs that printed reels, the warehouses that shipped them, the techs who maintained them — all folded. An entire craft disappeared almost overnight.

Film didn’t just die; it was dismantled.

The Disposable Future

Those old mechanical projectors? Built like tanks. With regular maintenance, they could serve multiple generations of projectionists. The new digital ones? Ten to fifteen years, tops. Then the lamp fades, the secure board dies, or the manufacturer stops supporting the firmware.

A 1950s projector can still run Casablanca.
A 2010 digital projector might not boot Avatar 2.

That’s the hidden cost of “progress.” Studios traded durability for control, and manufacturers finally found a way to make projectors a recurring expense. Theaters went from caretakers of machines that lasted forever to customers on a perpetual upgrade treadmill.

And now, as the first wave of digital projectors reaches end-of-life, the same impossible decision returns: close or upgrade. Most can’t afford another six-figure machine — especially after the pandemic. That’s why so many beloved local theaters are quietly disappearing. Not because the community stopped caring, but because the equipment they were forced to buy has an expiration date.

The Economic Setup

Converting to digital wasn’t free. Each screen cost tens of thousands to upgrade, so studios dangled a loan program — the Virtual Print Fee (VPF) — a subsidy that helped theaters buy the new projectors but tied them to studio contracts. Then came streaming, shrinking audiences, and finally the pandemic.

Theaters that had done everything right suddenly couldn’t pay for the equipment they’d been forced to buy. The studios protected their product so perfectly that they strangled their own marketplace.

The Murder-Suicide

“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” They fixed it anyway.

Hollywood killed the projection booth to stop piracy, and in doing so, it killed the communal experience that made movies matter. When the pandemic hit, the body was already cold — the shutdowns were just the coroner’s report.

Film had mortal reels but immortal machines. Digital has immortal files but disposable machines. A scratch you can forgive; a DRM error stops the show.

It’s hard not to see it as a murder-suicide — a business that locked itself so tightly it couldn’t breathe.

The Long Game

By the early 2010s, Hollywood wasn’t just modernizing projection — it was reshaping control. The “digital conversion” gave studios everything they needed for the world we have now: centralized encryption, instant file delivery, and a direct-to-home path that cut theaters out of the equation.

The Virtual Print Fee (VPF) was the bait. It helped theaters buy six-figure digital projectors, but those projectors could only play studio-approved content, through studio-issued keys, on studio-approved schedules. It was a loan with a leash — and when the subsidies expired, the independence went with them.

Even then, studios were already testing home distribution. Universal’s Tower Heist experiment in 2011 — a proposed $59.99 premium VOD just three weeks after theatrical — drew outrage and boycott threats from theater owners, and Universal backed down. But the direction of travel was obvious: bypass exhibitors entirely.

Digital delivery made that possible. Every film became a file, instantly streamable, tightly encrypted, and remotely controlled. Theaters carried the debt. The studios kept the keys.

What looked like modernization was really a strategic transfer of power.
The pandemic didn’t start that collapse — it merely exposed it. By the time streaming took over, the infrastructure was already in place. All that was left for the theaters was the bill.

The Goldmine That Collapsed

For a while, the projector companies thought they’d struck gold.
The first digital conversion created an unprecedented boom: thousands of theaters all upgrading at once, backed by studio subsidies and Virtual Print Fee financing. Companies like Barco, Christie, and NEC flooded the market with expensive, DCI-approved projectors — hardware that would supposedly need replacing every 10 to 15 years.

And that’s exactly the problem. When those first-generation systems began aging out around 2023, the same theaters that had mortgaged themselves to go digital were told they’d need to do it all again — another $50,000 to $100,000 per screen. For many, that wasn’t modernization. It was a death sentence.

The projector makers got their boom, but not their repeat business. Theaters closed. Chains filed for bankruptcy. Others scavenged used projectors instead of buying new ones. The “Laser Revolution” that companies like Barco are now pushing isn’t a market expansion — it’s a desperate restart button. Every new sale comes with fewer buyers left to sell to.

In the end, everyone lost. The studios got control, the projector companies got one big payday, and the theaters — the ones who made the movies feel larger than life — got buried under the cost of keeping up.

Looking back: The articles from 2012–2013 now read like prophecy — warning that conversion costs, DRM, and manufacturer control would crush small theaters within a decade. Ten years later, the projectors they were forced to buy are reaching end-of-life, and the closures they feared are finally arriving.

Epilogue: The One That Didn’t Make It

The theater in my hometown didn’t survive. It shut down at the end of the 1980s and sat empty for decades — a relic of another time. By the time anyone seriously considered saving it, the building was too far gone. After years of neglect, it was declared unrecoverable and eventually torn down.

And Yet, One More Thing

I used to think it all came down to the pandemic — that the shutdowns and empty seats were what finally did the theaters in. But now I see they did everything they were supposed to do. They modernized when the studios told them to. They borrowed when the banks said they could. They kept going through the rules, the restrictions, and the chaos. They played by the book — and still lost.

When the Lights Went Out