
Going Dark: The Final Days of Film Projection
By the end of 2014, the major Hollywood studios stopped shipping new releases on film prints, forcing every theater in America to either install expensive digital projection systems or close its doors. This short documentary follows projectionists and independent theater owners living through that deadline, watching decades-old 35mm projectors get pulled out and replaced with digital servers. Interviews cover what gets lost in the switch: the texture of film grain, the ritual of splicing reels, and the jobs of projectionists whose craft becomes obsolete overnight. Small-town and single-screen theaters describe the financial strain of finding tens of thousands of dollars per screen just to keep showing movies at all, with some choosing to shut down rather than convert. The film treats the changeover not as an abstract industry story but as a local one, told through the people who ran the booths and sold the tickets. It closes with the last flickers of a projector bulb and a format that, after a century, had no more prints left to run.