Detroit — Have you been out to a bar recently? A cool neighborhood bar in a city, the kind that younger people like to haunt. The vibes have changed, no doubt, but you don’t hear many positive things. Every headline reads like an obituary for alcohol, with zoomers drinking less than any generation before them.
What the discourse misses is how the bar scene is changing and adapting to the media-centric tastes of zoomers. Rather than shunning screen media, some bars are embracing it and hosting screenings of their own—but it just might be illegal.
I was in Detroit and planned to meet up with a friend at a cool-looking bar I’ve walked past many times but never stopped for a drink at. I was having a drink and waiting when the lights suddenly dimmed and the crowd shuffled chairs around and took their seats, facing a projector screen toward the corner of the bar.
I didn’t know it, but I’d stumbled into a Rocky Horror Picture night, with planned screenings of Rocky Horror and its lesser known sequel, Shock Treatment.
At first, I was annoyed. It seemed like the movie screenings would prevent talking and socializing. I like to circulate around in bars, talk to whoever I’m with, talk to strangers, and screen media is a mostly solitary endeavor.
I figured this was yet another concession to antisocial zoomer tendencies. Too shy to talk in bars, so they put on a movie to do the talking for them. I was wrong, however. In retrospect, the film screenings brought together the bar crowd in a different way and encouraged socializing.
For one, it forced everyone to sit down at tables closer together, crowding around the screen. Everyone watched the movies together and, after the films (and a few drinks), started talking about them. There was now a shared experience between the strangers in the crowd, a commonality that made new interactions feel natural and unforced.
A few girls who sat at the same table as me were locals, big fans of Rocky Horror, and came out that night specifically for the screening. They told me that bars do this all the time now, that watching movies in them is a growing trend.
As for the films, I can’t say I’m a big Rocky Horror fan, but I loved Shock Treatment. It’s a totally underrated film about the impact of external fame and influence on relationships. It’s extremely applicable to the social media era, where the impact of excessive online attention in our micro-influencer culture wreaks havoc on love lives everywhere.
Regardless of the actual movies, watching them in a bar was an interesting aesthetic experience. An already dimly lit bar, now nearly pitch black, with just a few neon lights behind the bar and the glow of the projector screen. More like a theater, but the bar is right in the theater instead of down the hallway.
The growing trend with movie theaters themselves, if you haven’t noticed this, is for them to become bars and restaurants in their own right. Full bars in the lobby, sometimes even restaurants. They’ll deliver food and beverages to your seat so you can enjoy a full meal in the dark.
It’s a little preposterous, if you ask me. Desperate, even. Theaters can’t rely on films themselves to draw people in anymore, so they have to invest in giant massage chair recliners and gourmet chefs. It’s not just because people stream movies at home, either. Hollywood has seriously fallen off, and most new movies are slop, at best, with only a few actually good films released each year.
Perhaps the better model is the other way around. Bars should become little movie theaters, instead of movie theaters becoming bars.
Note how these bars aren’t screening new releases, either. It’s always old, classic movies and shows. One of my favorite Ann Arbor spots always has weird old movies or anime playing on a screen behind the bar. Like a sports bar for art hoes, playing Neon Genesis Evangelion instead of football. With subtitles on, the audio drowned out by the bar’s loud music.
Sports bars pioneered this model, no doubt, with dozens of screens all playing the big games. That hits a broader cultural segment than anime for older generations, perhaps. But zoomers have different media tastes, more specialized, more niche. They gravitate towards spots that indulge their culture rather than mass appeal.
The only risk, of course, is that screening films and media like this for a public audience is technically a copyright violation, believe it or not. Venues are supposed to purchase public performance licenses from distributors, or producers directly, before screening a film for an audience.
In practice, though, small bars can definitely get away with it and are unlikely to be served with expensive lawsuits. Such restrictions feel like a dead legacy from an age when media distribution was limited to theaters, and tightly controlled. With everything available online anyways, does it really matter if a bar plays an old movie every once in a while?
If anything, we should be encouraging anything that gets people out of the house to gather together. It’s true that young people drink less than they ever did, but they also go out in general less than ever before. Society is atomized more and more every year, with social connection harder and harder to find.
Regardless of alcohol consumption, bars provide an easy sort of social liquidity. If showing movies is how they survive the teetotaling ways of zoomers, so be it.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
