Two weeks before I saw "Barbie" at the Clyde last summer, I saw "Oppenheimer" at the Crest. So I guess you could say I did the "Barbenheimer" thing, only not on the same day, or even in the same week.
The Crest is a fourplex in Shoreline, just north of Seattle, and for a long time it's been everybody's favorite bargain house. Tickets used to be $3, and then they were $4, and now they're up to $9 or more, depending on when you go to the movies. "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie" were both playing there, and when Ms. Applebaum and I came out after "Oppenheimer" ended, the "Barbie" people were lined up out the door, most of them in pink, except for one guy wearing nothing but black. We figured he had to be Goth Ken.
So we could've seen both movies right then, assuming "Barbie" wasn't sold out, but after three hours of "Oppenheimer", we decided to get pizza instead.
The Clyde is a one-screen cinema in Langley (population 1,150) on the south end of Whidbey Island. It opened in 1937, owned and operated by the Clyde family, who also ran the local garage and gas station. More than 80 years on, the Clyde survives by mixing it up with a diverse selection of revivals, art-house features, documentaries and commercial hits.
The manager was standing by the door when we went up to buy our tickets, wearing a pink T-shirt and greeting folks as they came in. He said they no longer bother with a separate senior price because at least half of the people who go to the Clyde are seniors, anyway. Tickets are $10.
Before the movie started, he took a couple of minutes to plug the shows that were coming up: "Grease" and "Best In Show" on revival nights, and (or course) "Oppenheimer" and more screenings of "Barbie". He added a brief pitch for a local school bond measure scheduled for the fall ballot, and then the room turned dark and the world turned pink.
A couple of things I've noticed going to the movies in and around Seattle since the pandemic. Weekday matinees, there are usually no more than eight or ten people in the theater, and sometimes not that many. It's almost a private screening, though in the last few months, those numbers appear to be picking up again. And at the Crest and the Clyde both, a significant percentage of those watching are old.
I imagine the numbers would skew differently for the latest "Transformers" or "Fast and Furious" or Marvel Universe movie, but it suggests that for now, at least, there's still an audience out there of people in their 50s and 60s and 70s, who will pay to see (more or less) grownup movies on a big screen, as long as they don't have to take out a bank loan to do it.
Even if the movie's derived from a toy and its primary color is pink.
