Popcorn in the IFI: is this the buttery end of a long campaign to turn cinemas into feeding pens?

Hot news this week for the cinematic wing of the “End is nigh!” brigade (of which I am a clubhouse member). The Irish Film Institute, long a holdout against exploded kernels in lampshade-sized containers, has announced it is to begin selling popcorn. The statement betrayed a fear that, like the antagonists in Dawn of the Dead, hordes of enraged Kenji Mizoguchi fans would, corduroys brushing the tops of scuffed desert boots, be shuffling down Eustace Street to press their sad faces against the IFI’s windows. “We’re committed to keeping our focus on the art house cinema ambience while providing comfort and snacks for everyone,” the note on Instagram read.

In truth, it has been a long time since the average art house cinema served only organic flapjacks baked by the manager’s peacenik grandmother. The era of Gitanes smoke obscuring scratched prints of L’Avventura belongs to the last century. One is tempted to blame a certain doll for the decision, but the other half of Barbenheimer may be the culprit. We have no word yet if the IFI will be offering a Poppenheimer Combo. Don’t bet against it.

If that is what is required to keep the lights on post-Covid, fair enough. One cannot, however, help but see this as the buttery end of a long campaign to turn cinemas into feeding pens. During the silent era, the notion of selling popcorn in auditoriums would have seemed like madness. “Movie theatres wanted nothing to do with popcorn,” Andrew Smith, author of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn, told the Smithsonian magazine in 2017. “Because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theatres. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.”

It seems that, in the US, the rush towards the snack economy kicked off with the birth of sound and the advance of the Great Depression. The raw kernels were spectacularly cheap and, even when heavily marked up, offered a reasonably affordable treat for a chap with holes in his shoes. By the 1950s, popcorn had become inextricably linked with the mainstream filmgoing experience. To this day, a “popcorn movie” is an undemanding treat aimed at those who do not boast about the height of their brows. The famous “Let’s All Go to the Lobby,” commercial – depicting sugary comestibles merrily celebrating their own consumption – arrived in 1957 and hung about American cinemas for decades. By that stage, the trip to the “concession stand” had become a holy ritual.

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It took a while for British and Irish cinemas to catch up with the heart-stopping levels of gourmandism common across the Atlantic. If you were lucky, an elderly lady with a tray around her neck would offer you a melting Choc Ice during the interval (no, really). The notion that one might actively enjoy visiting the overpriced sweety stall was for a more slavishly indoctrinated future. All sensible folk then stocked up on jelly babies and Fanta before entering the darkened space. It was then a bandit economy.

High-end cinemas bring hamburgers, cocktails and craft beers straight to your padded armchair. Is that better or worse? It is certainly more expensive

The shift to in-cinema dining on the American scale seems to have arrived with the multiplex in the early 1990s. By the end of that decade, it was possible to approach the screen as a wispy athlete and, long before Leonardo DiCaprio had slipped fatally into the icy Atlantic, boast fully clogged arteries and a waistline akin to Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. Hot dogs. Atomic-blue slushies. Nachos with orange polyurethane cheese. The public readily embraced the rituals that had characterised American cinemagoing for decades. Many find it incomprehensible that one could sit before the latest MCU flick without a container of sugared fluid large enough to douse a forest fire. A recent, excruciating Bafta video introducing Richard E Grant as co-presenter of the body’s awards just had to ask him about his favourite movie snacks. “Popcorn, salted,” he dutifully replied.

The multiplex is now a stinking, burping cacophony of consumption. Elsewhere, high-end cinemas bring hamburgers, cocktails and craft beers straight to your padded armchair. Is that better or worse? It is certainly more expensive. It certainly does more to distract from what’s happening on screen.

What are you going to do? Much as we would wish it otherwise, the exhibitors function within the brutal matrix of neoliberal economics. They have to pass some of the money they get from ticket sales to the film studios. More or less every ounce of profit from food goes straight into the cinema’s bank account. “Without the hefty concession profits,” Brad Tuttle wrote in Time magazine more than a decade ago, “there would be no movie theatre business.” The intervening pandemic has done nothing to make the business any less precarious. Welcome to the real world. The fantasy happens only on screen.