As you might have heard, the movie theater business is in trouble. Attendance is down, ticket prices are up, and MoviePass—the rare service that actually managed to drive consumers back to movie theaters—is now bleeding to a slow death after a recent, spectacular collapse.
You can pinpoint all kinds of specific reasons for the decline of movie theater attendance, but here’s the problem in a single sentence: going to the movies is a pain in the ass. Especially when you can spare yourself all the hassle and expense by staying home and streaming a movie on your couch. Of course, you lose something, too—the communal aspect of watching with a rapt audience, and the unmatched immersion that comes with the movie theater experience.
But what if you could have it both ways: a communal, immersive movie theater experience from the comfort of your couch? When I learned that the virtual reality company Oculus recently launched an app called Oculus Venues—which, among other things, promises to replicate the movie theater experience in virtual reality—I knew I needed to try it. Previous Venues screenings have included Reservoir Dogs and Apocalypse Now. This week’s screening was National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, the not-particularly-beloved 2002 comedy that helped to launch the career of a smirky Canuck named Ryan Reynolds. Who could say no?
Here’s how Oculus Venues works: You strap on your Oculus VR headset, which you can do at home or school or anywhere with a solid internet connection. You create a little avatar—mine is a cowboy with a giant handlebar mustache—and log onto the Oculus Venues live-stream. You’ll appear in a pretty impressive facsimile of a movie theater, with a big screen in front of everybody (though, much like real life, you can look around anywhere you like).
When you arrive, you’ll be slotted into the best available seat in the "theater," but you can teleport around as much as you like. What you can’t do is take a seat someone else is already occupying. (The 7 p.m. Van Wilder live-stream hovered between 30 and 40 people—an unusually high number, according to several of my fellow moviegoers.) And most importantly: Unless you choose to disable it, your microphone will be on the entire time, which allows you—and anybody else!—to broadcast anything you want to say to the rest of the theater.
If you’ve ever been on the internet, you can probably imagine the many, many ways in which this could immediately go horribly wrong. So how does Venues prevent harassment? As far as I can tell, the community is self-policing. You can report bad behavior, and the app assures that harassers will be banned from future streams. There’s also a stern warning that precedes your entry into Venues: "Be respectful. Avoid offensive language. Report bad behavior."
But this was a screening of Van Wilder—a movie in which a dude gets his horny bulldog to cum inside a bunch of empty donuts, then feeds them to his rivals—so the condemnation of offensive language and bad behavior felt a little disingenuous. Other than a brief, awkward moment when a little kid logged into the stream before being ushered away by an embarrassed sibling, this was a raucous crowd, and nobody objected to much of anything. And maybe it was the relatively small size of the crowd—or the natural intimacy and humanity that comes through when you’re turning your actual head to talk to someone’s avatar—but everyone I met, including the Venues veterans, were extremely welcoming.
As the movie began, I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibilities for legitimately great, non-Van Wilder uses for this technology. You could teach an entire online film class, leading a discussion of VR users across the globe by dissecting a movie in real time. You could organize a movie night with far-flung friends, earnestly watching something good together (or Mystery Science Theater-ing your way through something like The Room). You could do a virtual sing-along screening of a musical, with diehards filling a virtual theater to belt out The Greatest Showman’s show-tunes with their fellow fans—and all from the comforts of their own couches.
And maybe that’s where Oculus Venues is heading! But this is the internet in 2018, so the responses of my fellow online moviegoers ended up being more or less what you’d expect from a broad cross-section of early VR adopters. There were Rick & Morty references; a genuinely illuminating discussion of the best ways to drink booze while wearing an Oculus headset; a significantly less illuminating discussion about whether or not Tara Reid is still hot; and at least one guy who used his VR remote to make it look like his avatar was jerking off.
You might be wondering: Wasn’t it hard to pay attention to Van Wilder with a bunch of strangers talking over it the whole time? The answer is: Yes, but who cares? Oculus Venues does offer plenty of tools to minimize the chatter if that’s what you want. You can watch the live-stream alone; mute any users who are annoying you; or turn on closed captions so you can follow the dialogue without tapping out of the chatter. But after a few minutes, I realized that watching Van Wilder wasn’t actually the point of this exercise. It was just a framework—an immersive kind of chatroom that used the familiarity of the movie theater to bring a bunch of strangers together for a shared experience. And if that framework was hung around a crappy old Ryan Reynolds movie, all the better, because it immediately became that much easier to ignore it.
So I settled into my chair—a couch at home, a stadium seat in the virtual world—and happily bullshitted about whatever with anybody in earshot. At one point, apropos of nothing, a dude with a blue mohawk warped over to the chair next to me and started a brief, friendly chat in which we discovered we’d both grown up in Minnesota, within a 15-minute drive of each other. He mentioned that Venues was going to live-stream a Minnesota Twins game later this week, and we agreed to say hey to each other if we recognized each other’s mohawk and mustache.
The possibilities for these fun, little connections are baked into these communal experiences—the kind of thing that has fallen by the wayside in the much bigger, much coarser internet that has doomed us all today. In the end, Oculus Venues felt less like the future of moviegoing than the past of web-surfing. In this early phase of consumer VR, the Oculus Go still caters to a niche community of users, which makes it a chummier and more intimate way to connect with strangers. It reminded me of AOL in the 56k era of the internet, when you’d pick a screen name and hop into a chat room for the sheer novelty of striking up a conversation with a friendly stranger. Maybe someday Venues, or a service like it, will manage to get all of us staring silently at a virtual movie screen. But for now, gabbing around the movie we’re “watching” is a fascinating experience in itself.
