Why are there so many old movies coming back to theaters?

As every December 24th, traditional TV is ready to offer us the classic Christmas Eve movie Trading Places, a 1983 festive classic featuring Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Beyond its intrinsic value, this film by John Landis has become a cultural symbol. While the comedy undoubtedly has merit, turning on the TV to find a film that encapsulates the exuberance—and evident challenges—of the 1980s (describing it simply as “politically incorrect” falls short) transcends the movie itself. Its cyclical and tireless return, along with the jokes and memes it generates, reflects its enduring resonance. This year, in Italy, we’ll take an additional step in celebrating this over-40-year-old movie: it will return to theaters for three days—December 9, 10, and 11—in a restored version, shifting the hearth from homes to cinemas across the country and reinforcing a growing trend that benefits box-office revenues. 

In fact, the return after more than forty years of Trading Places follows the theatres' strategy of bringing titles from the past back to the big screen, so that those who never had the opportunity can (re)discover them at the cinema, tying their reunion to the sacred bond of the theatre. Sometimes the reason is an anniversary to be celebrated, as happened with Pulp Fiction and its long birthday that lasted for the whole of 2024, thirty years after winning the Palme d'Or, then transformed into a pillar of film culture as cinephile as mainstream that viewers could watch restored. This last fact is another reason why a work often returns to the cinema: the possibility of being able to see fine work done on old films that thus acquire new life after having gone through a restoration process that can give new light and sharpness to the beauty of the images. 

It is also a way for those involved in such an operation to show the work they have done and to hope for subsequent spending by consumers, who cannot miss out on the dvd, blu-ray, steelbook or box set of the latest version of their favourite film. But also to allow a continuous recirculation of knowledge about the history of cinema and the titles that, year after year, have contributed to building imagery and shaping the spectators' imagination. There is also an aspect that, data in hand, shows that bringing old films back to the cinema contributes in no small way to the box-office. If on the one hand there is the intention to devote retrospectives to themes or directors, actors or topics that also contribute to determining the identity of the cinemas and their reference cinemas (an essential element to be able to survive in the streaming market), on the other hand it has been realised that cult screenings lead to the theatres filling up and, therefore, to the coffers. With a gross of over €107,000 and 11,000 admissions, Satoshi Kon's 1997 Perfect Blue debuted in first place on the first of its three days in 2024. An immense work of Japanese animation, it has influenced from Darren Aronofsky to David Lynch making the rounds up to Christopher Nolan.. The film about an aspiring actress and the abuse she suffers in the entertainment industry ended its days on the big screen with €198,000 and 27,000 admissions, in second place behind only Luca Guadagnino's newly released Challengers. 

There was also a surprise for Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, which entered the May 2024 podium with its 4K remastered version distributed by Cat People, second place on the second day in the over 205 Italian cinemas that screened it, and after having been presented ‘in preview’ with its director at Rome's Cinema Troisi. A collaboration with Minerva Pictures that, especially recently, has been pushing its restorations more and more, starting with the presence with four films in this year's Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, a place dedicated to the rediscovery and exaltation of classics. From Pietro Germi's Guerra 1915-18 to Antonio Petrangeli's La visita, arriving at Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer and Marco Bellocchio's Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina, the latter also returning to theatres from 4 July 2024. If Richard Kelly's 2001 1990s cult film Donnie Darko by Richard Kelly may seem like a novelty, especially in its director's cut (bringing in 9,191 spectators and grossing €70,658), it is still surprising how much Nolan's Interstellar manages to gross, which in 2024 is re-released as, at least in Italy, it happens only once a year.This time the excuse is its tenth anniversary, which made it reach the first position in three days of programming, with 909,352 box-office hits. The sagas, which clearly have a hard core of loyal fans, also performed well. However, if the positive results of the re-release of the three Lord of the Rings films and all the Spider-Man films, from Sam Raimi to Marvel, are not intriguing, it is certainly peculiar to find Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (in sixth place with €586,838) in the top ten box-office figures for July, unconnected to a successful complete saga and distributed by Warner Bros. on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. 

Why and how films from ten, twenty or more years ago continue to attract more audiences is then to be found ad personam. Often the presentation of the work accompanied by its director or actor makes the difference and is a source of enrichment for those who can hear, years later, what a given title means in the economy of an author's career. As with Mommy, screened by the Cineteca di Bologna at the Cinema Modernissimo and presented by Xavier Dolan, in a special version, among other things, in that it is in 35mm film freshly printed by the laboratory L'immagine Ritrovata at the Canadian director's request and to which Cinémathèque Suisse, Association Les Amis du Festival di Cannes and Fondazione Prada contributed. Or to pay homage to a filmmaker, as with Claudio Caligari, to whom a room at Perugia's PostModernissimo cinema was dedicated, with two sold-out screenings of his latest film Non essere cattivo from 2015, attended by the cast composed of, among others, Alessandro Borghi, Luca Marinelli and Valerio Mastandrea. Sometimes, it is only the possibility of being able to see one's favourite films in a triumphant dimension that influences viewers to return to the cinema, especially if they are works from the past that can only be retrieved on DVD or cassette. And perhaps this is precisely the point: has the theatre become the new videocassette? If once it was the purchase of films or their rental that formed a legion of cinephiles, the opportunity to see them directly in the cinema makes fans rush to retrieve them as their creators intended them, i.e. for the big screen. And if many are fans who have consumed theirs, of cassettes and DVDs, others can devote themselves to discovering the titles directly at the cinema, especially if they are spectators of a lower age bracket.

According to an article in Il Post, the trend in Italian cinemas is changing precisely because of a target audience that is often marginalised, in terms of auteur films in particular: young people. It is true that, in cases such as the remastered version or the anniversary of a film, these are titles that are already famous in themselves, thus making the data on first releases more impressive (as stated by distributor Andrea Romeo of I Wonder Pictures after the success of The Zone of Interest and The Substance, again in the piece in Il Post: «Our perception is that before Covid the young audience counted less than 10% for this type of film and that now it counts more than 50%»). But it is hard not to believe that many under-35 audiences do not also influence cult box office. A practice that is increasing its reach and facilitating the recovery of the theatrical audience, severely affected by the pandemic and the difficulty of the public to re-enter the mechanisms of film consumption, but which may have taken a boost from the game-play between old and new classics. Playing, yes, on nostalgia, but not forgetting that there are also those who, those films, will be able to see them in the right way for the first time.