The building appeared closed from the outside at dusk. Curtains were drawn, the lights were dimmed and the only workers still inside were cleaning in preparation for business the next day.
But in the side room sat a projector, illuminating onto a screen just a few feet away. About two dozen chairs, two couches and a loveseat filled the space, with just under 20 people ready to watch the film “Hard Truths.” The smell of coffee filled the air, rather than the smell of buttered popcorn.
This wasn’t a typical movie-going location. It was Hopscotch Coffee and Kitchen — a cafe doubling as Cicada Cinema’s “theater” for the night.
“Seeing a movie in a unique space, I guess for a lot of people that’s probably pretty new,” Josh Brewer, one of the founders of Cicada Cinema, said. “It’s never gonna be perfectly dark, like a movie theater, but we try our best to project and make the audio and video experiences (the) best we can to respect art, right? I mean, that’s our job.”
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, movie theater closures have become increasingly common, even locally in Bloomington with AMC CLASSIC Bloomington 11 shutting its doors Sept. 15, 2023. However, the medium for showing movies has adapted, bringing groups like Cicada — a pop-up cinema — into the forefront of community movie-going.
AMC — the largest movie theater chain in the world with over 900 total venues — closed 10.6% of its theaters from 2019-23. Cinemark is the third largest theater chain in the United States, and it closed almost 10% of its theaters in that same span.
The pandemic isn’t the only cause for these closures. A rise in streaming — with services such as Max, Disney+ and Paramount+ gaining prominence in the last six years — has allowed people to stay at home and watch a movie rather than go to the big screen.
With traditional movie theaters on the decline, film-lovers have had to come up with alternatives. The closing of AMC CLASSIC 11 left only one mainstream theater open in Bloomington, but events with Cicada, occasional showings at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater and consistent programs at the IU Cinema help fill the void.
And Bloomington is only one of many cities across the country reacting to the changing landscape.
Central Michigan University film professor Kevin Corbett has noticed theaters moving within different venues. In downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Celebration Cinema Studio Park features a theater alongside loft apartments and a grocery store, reflecting the transition from “standalone buildings” to an interconnected area in “residential spaces.”
Movie theaters have consistently adapted to new inventions through the years. The VHS player emerged in the late 1970s, then came physical media with DVDs in the mid-1990s and later Blu-ray in the mid-2000s — so their adaptation to streaming is nothing new.
Joan Hawkins, a film professor at the IU Media School, said this means films studios are making movies bigger and more spectacular, creating “experiences that we couldn’t possibly have at home.” With “huge images and surround sound,” immersion becomes a selling point for movie-goers to continue to go to theaters.
Films such as “Dune: Part Two” and “The Brutalist” are examples of these vast, expansive movies released in the past year. While “Dune: Part Two” racked up over $700 million at the worldwide box office, “The Brutalist” earned a little over $50 million, showcasing the duality in the success of these projects as well as the impact of the widespread distribution which “Dune: Part Two” received.
Even with fully-functioning theaters, rural locations offer a narrow selection of new movies, which further impacts films with smaller scale releases like “The Brutalist.” When Hawkins visited her mother in Hettinger, North Dakota, in 2004, the one theater in town and others in the surrounding area all showed the same movie, limiting the viewing options for residents.
“The only way you could see a different, first-run film would be to drive two hours one-way to go to Fargo, North Dakota, or to go to Rapid City,” Hawkins said. “That has a huge impact on what people are able to be exposed to.”
This trend has not improved over the past 20 years.
Some movies only show in theaters 30 days before they’re released to streaming, a number Corbett said hurts “smaller-scale” movies. In turn, this slim window forces theaters to depend on blockbusters, like the next “Avengers” movie.
“There’s two types of people,” Corbett said. “They’re not going to go to a movie theater, period. And then at the other end of the extreme, they’re gonna go to see the big ones, those blockbusters franchises. And I think that the industry is going to continue to rely on those.”
However, even with their reliance on blockbusters, theaters have failed to return to their pre-pandemic attendance levels — and Corbett’s not sure they ever will.
But that doesn’t spell the end of movie theaters.
“The most important thing to remember — and the thing I always emphasize when people want to talk about the death of movie theaters — is that there’s not one type of movie theater,” Alicia Kozma, the director of IU Cinema, said. “Even if we just look statistically, it’s mainstream movie theaters that are closing. It’s not art houses, it’s not indie theaters.”
Compared to mainstream movie theaters, art houses typically show more artistic films rather than entertainment ones. The programming also centers around more than just new United States releases, which means when mainstream theaters struggle with big studios releasing fewer movies, arthouses can continue to succeed.
In 2021, the Coolidge Corner Theater in Boston began a $12.5 million expansion project that added 14,000 square feet, including two new theaters. In 2025, the nonprofit group running the Roxie Theater in San Francisco started a public fundraising campaign to, as the theater’s website wrote, “purchase (the) building, invest in technology upgrades and expand (the) programming.”
As a board member of Art House Convergence — a group that advocates for the approximately 435 individual art house theaters across the country — Kozma knows how essential these alternatives are.
“There are now several communities where there are no mainstream theaters by major metropolitan cities, but there are art house theaters,” Kozma said. “(People are) still being served, they’re just not being served by multiplexes.”
The IU Cinema’s affiliation with the university doesn’t impact its status as an art house, which has become a more common model in recent years. Most recently, an art house opened in association with East Tennessee State University, just as IU Cinema operates with the university.
This model provides the cinema with greater freedom, as some endowed funds at the IU Foundation present fewer restrictions to IU cinema than if it were a nonprofit. The flexibility allows the cinema to spend its funding on producing programs, ranging from paying their part-time staff and projectionists to securing screening rights and marketing materials.
The IU Cinema has about 200 programs a year, collaborating with groups and partners or on its own. Kozma and Managing Director Brittany Friesner decide on non-partner programming with key goals to fulfill, including “highlighting new voices” and “filling the cultural gaps” within campus and Bloomington.
Creative alternatives, such as Cicada Cinema, have also emerged — and they’re still surviving, even after the pandemic. Cicada’s mission is to present different types of “underrepresented films” in different locations across the town, including Hopscotch, the Orbit Room and Switchyard Park.
Brewer began Cicada with four others in 2016, first showing movies in a room at “The Void,” a now-demolished venue. Almost nine years later, Brewer is the last remaining founder of the group — and Cicada is continuing to showcase movies to the Bloomington community.
“We’re pretty dedicated to trying to support the local movie going scene,” Brewer said. “So we don’t compete with everybody else. We try to get as many people going to things as possible as we believe that’s the best way to build a scene.”
Cicada’s venues can vary from a cafe to a bar to an outdoor park, occurring typically at least once a week. Brewer and his coworkers pick the films based on the aesthetic of each location — an underground movie fits the underground location of The Orbit Room, or queer films are presented at The Back Door night club.
Programming for each event directly affects Cicada’s financial sustainability. The group must pay a licensing fee to the distributor of the film, which allows Cicada to publicly screen the movies, and the cost ranges anywhere from $150 to over $250.
Brewer always aims to break even at each event, but no matter the price of the licensing fee, Cicada will keep its ticket prices fixed.
“We’ve always been really striving to make them affordable, so anybody — any means — can at least hopefully go,” Brewer said. “We always kept our ticket prices around $8, which is pretty low in 2025, and that’s on purpose.”
Attendance is no longer a major struggle for Brewer, with the cinema averaging anywhere from 20 to over 100 people at any given event. However, outreach is still a struggle for Cicada with no consistent schedule or set location to fall back on, leading Brewer to promote the group in different ways.
“I mean, you’re like a band,” Brewer said. “You’re selling merch, you’re making sure people (and) their friends are going too. It’s just like a band.”
Brewer hopes to have a future permanent residency for Cicada, but for now, the pop-up element is how the group will continue to share the art of filmmaking — with a screening of “The Cruise” on May 9 at the Showers Administration Building next up.
“The end goal is to have people seeing movies and making sure that in Bloomington, we can have a world class conversation on contemporary movies or old movies,” Brewer said. “But we want to be part of that conversation, and if we don’t bring these movies to town, otherwise people wouldn’t see them or talk about them.”
IU junior Nolan Goode — who is pursuing a bachelor's in film television and digital production — has been a fan of movies his whole life. He remembers the times his aunt took him and her nieces and nephews to the nearby theater to watch the “Harry Potter” movies when they would release.
Growing up with streaming services never deterred Goode from choosing to watch a movie in theaters over his own TV — because that’s how he believes it’s meant to be watched.
“It’s just really the best way to watch movies, with all these other people on this huge screen as it was intended,” Goode said. “It’s a movie in its truest form.”
That form can be displayed on a 70-millimeter IMAX screen. It can be inside a traditional AMC theater. It can be displayed on the 34-foot screen inside the IU Cinema.
But it can also be presented on a projector nestled in the side room of a closed coffee shop.
