You know the course of current events is getting pretty hairy when even famed horror master/best-selling author Stephen King is starting to feel nostalgic. While he’s best known for dreaming up artful ways to either scare his audience or make them empty their tear ducts, a recent social media post shows that the man who dreamed up his own, much deadlier pandemic crisis misses going to the movies just as much as the rest of us.
Stephen King’s message, via Twitter, showed the man’s frustrations. And in his own way, King tells this story with a beautiful picture of the moviegoing experience, painted with only his words:
While Stephen King has always been exceedingly adept at voicing the concerns of salt-of-the-earth characters, the man who’s given us The Shining, The Stand and Pet Sematary has just landed a tweet that really taps into the more sensitive side of how everyone is feeling during the current crisis.
It’s not that livestream watch parties and being able to catch Trolls: World Tour through a VOD rental aren’t interesting experiments in moviegoing. In fact, if you’re a fan of Birds of Prey, it’s probably pretty sweet that the home video release was bumped up incredibly early because of everything that’s been going on.
But, as you see in the details of Stephen King’s tweet, nothing replaces the moviegoing experience that is sadly out of reach at the moment. With all major theater chains closed up tighter than The Overlook Hotel in the offseason, many folks are surely getting a bit itchy about heading out to see Wonder Woman 1984 or No Time To Die in the way they were meant to be seen: with a crowd, on a huge screen and with theater-quality speakers.
As we’re all ideally, but still reluctantly, locked down as tight as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, those words are as inspiring as those you’d hear spoken by Red himself. It’s a hopeful picture of what moviegoing has always been like in ideal circumstances, and if we’re lucky, it’s what we’ll be able to return to once everything opens back up.
It certainly helps that in the moviegoing future, we’ll be able to see some more Stephen King movies heading to theater screens. With several of his stories, like the most recently announced adaptation of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon and the remake of Firestarter in various phases of production, it shouldn’t be too much longer before we get to see a King-branded would-be blockbuster in front of our faces again.
When movie theaters open, a lot of folks will rejoice when they feel it’s safe enough to go back. And you can bet that when Stephen King returns to his local movie house, there will be a big old soda, a box of Junior Mints and only the freshest of popcorns waiting for him and everyone else returning to their cinematic cathedral of choice. Until that day comes, stay safe and stay sane out there, folks.
