Sometimes I try to imagine what cinema will be like in a hundred years and I end up asking myself an even stranger question: will there still be something we can call cinema?
I'm not suggesting that movies will disappear or that we'll stop telling stories. That won't happen as long as human beings exist. I'm talking about cinema as we know it: a screen in front of us, seats, a dark room, and a group of people watching the lives of others.
For more than a century, that has been the rule. Everything around the screen has changed, but the screen remains.
First we saw silent, black-and-white images. Then came sound, color, widescreen formats, big-budget blockbusters, surround sound, digital effects, and 3D. Theaters became more comfortable and the images more perfect, but the relationship between film and viewer remained virtually the same: they are inside and we are outside.
We see the character running, but we remain seated. We see the ocean, but we don't feel the water. We hear an explosion, but we know that nothing can reach us.
There is a very clear boundary between the film and us.
I believe that frontier will be the next thing that technology will try to destroy.
When the movie left the theater
For decades it seemed impossible to imagine a major film outside of a movie theater. Going to the cinema was an event. You had to choose a show, buy a ticket, stand in line, and enter a theater with strangers.
The popcorn, the darkness, and the sound weren't just props. They were part of the movie.
Then cinema entered our homes.
First came television, then video, DVD, and finally streaming platforms. Netflix didn't invent home cinema, but it achieved something crucial: it accustomed us to the idea that a film is not an event, but an option available at any time.
Today we can watch a blockbuster on a huge television, a tablet, or a phone screen. We can pause it to get food, answer a message, return to a scene, or abandon it without remorse.
We gained freedom, but we lost a certain ceremony.
Before, when the theater lights went down, the movie took over. Now we control it. Perhaps that's why many movies have become something we "have on" while doing other things.
The movie theater still offers a larger screen, better sound, and a collective experience. But will that be enough in twenty, fifty, or one hundred years?
I don't believe it.
To survive, cinema will have to offer us something we can't easily replicate at home. A bigger picture and moving seats won't be enough.
You will have to let us in.
The disappearance of the screen
The first forms of that future already exist, although they are still primitive.
Virtual reality can place the user at the center of a digitally created space. Spatial sound allows us to hear a voice behind us. Systems are being developed that can simulate touch, resistance, temperature, and even smells.
For now, we need headsets, controllers, and cumbersome devices. The experience can be impressive for a few minutes, but it still doesn't replace the natural way we perceive the world.
However, all technology starts out being inconvenient.
The first mobile phones looked like bricks. The first films were barely a few minutes long. The first digital effects aged very poorly. We shouldn't imagine cinema a hundred years from now by only looking at the limitations of today's technology.
Future theaters may not have a screen.
We would enter an empty space, and when the film began, the room would disappear. A city, a forest, a spaceship, or some other place would appear around us. The characters would walk among us with volume, depth, and a seemingly physical presence.
We wouldn't be looking at the deck of the Titanic. We'd be on it.
We could walk through its corridors, approach the characters, and observe events happening simultaneously in different places. Each spectator would have a different perspective.
Then a problem would arise that traditional cinema never had: where should we look?
A director controls our eyes through framing. They decide what we see, from what distance, and for how long. If the screen disappears, part of that control disappears as well. The director would no longer have to simply construct a succession of shots. They would have to create a complete world and guide us through it without forcing us to look in only one direction.
Cinema would begin to resemble theater, virtual reality, and video games all at the same time.
But that would only be the beginning.
We within the story
What if the movie knew who we were?
Artificial intelligence can already create images, imitate voices, modify faces, and produce scenes that were never filmed. In a hundred years, a movie could be generated and transformed while we are watching it.
It could recognize our voice, observe our reactions, and remember our decisions.
If something frightens us, the story might intensify that fear. If a character interests us, they might become more important. If we try to save someone, the film might respond to our actions.
We would no longer be spectators. We would be participants.
We could even physically appear within the play. A system would scan our face, voice, and movements to transform us into a character. The actors would look at us, call out our name, and respond differently depending on our actions.
A detective film might hold different clues for each person. A romance story might tailor its characters to our preferences. A horror film might uncover exactly what scares us and build the experience around that fear.
Two people would enter a play with the same title and come out after living completely different stories.
That sounds fascinating, but it also raises a question: if each viewer modifies the film, does a film still exist?
Perhaps the future work will not have a definitive version. Perhaps it will be a collection of characters, places, conflicts, and possibilities that are arranged differently each time someone enters.
The director wouldn't decide everything that happens. He would establish the rules of a universe.
A film created solely for me
At some point, it won't even be necessary to choose an existing movie.
We can order it.
“I want a mystery story set in Havana in the 1950s. I want to participate as an investigator. I want it to last two hours and I don’t want to know the ending.”
The film could be created in that instant.
It wouldn't need to have been filmed beforehand. Its streets, characters, voices, and conflicts would emerge as we progressed through the story. If we decided to enter a building that wasn't part of the plot, the system would construct its interior before we even opened the door.
This would democratize a part of filmmaking. Someone without millions of dollars could create worlds that are currently only within reach of major studios. But it could also produce an unbearable amount of garbage.
When anyone can produce a hundred films in a day, creating images will cease to be exceptional. The difficult part will be having something to say.
A machine can produce a perfect chase scene, a gigantic battle, or a weeping face. What's unclear is whether it will understand why a particular look, a silence, or an imperfect image can stay with us for a lifetime.
Cinema is not just what we see. It's what remains when it's over.
Actors who don't exist and dead people who continue working
Actors of the future will not need to be real people.
They can be created for a film and maintain a career for decades. They will have a recognizable face, a voice, a public persona, and millions of followers, even though there is no human being behind them.
They won't grow old, they won't get sick, and they won't die. Nor will they demand better contracts.
At the same time, deceased actors could return. Their films, interviews, and recordings will provide enough information to reconstruct their appearance and manner of speaking. A deceased performer could star in a new play a hundred years later.
That will no longer be just a special effect. It will be a form of commercial resurrection.
Who gets to decide what happens to a copy of a dead person? Their family? The studio that owns their films? A contract signed decades earlier?
An actor might appear defending ideas they rejected throughout their life. They might participate in scenes they would never have agreed to. Their face would continue to work, even though the person could no longer object.
Perhaps a time will come when actors sell the rights to their digital bodies in the same way they sell the rights to a performance today. They won't sign a contract for just one film, but for all the films that can be produced using their likeness over the next fifty years.
When all that happens, a truly human actor could become a luxury.
Feel the movie
Current cinema primarily uses our eyes and ears. Future cinema will attempt to engage the rest of the body.
We could feel wind, humidity, heat, cold, and vibrations. Smells would appear at the precise moment. If the character walks through a forest, we would perceive the wet earth. If they enter an abandoned house, we would notice the dust and the aged wood.
It wouldn't be the mechanical effects of some current theaters, where a seat shakes or a little water falls on the audience. It would be a precise and coordinated simulation.
Then would come something much more complicated: intervening directly in the brain.
The brain-computer interfaces currently being researched primarily pursue medical objectives, such as enabling a paralyzed person to control a device. We are still a long way from being able to project an entire movie into the mind. However, a hundred years represents an enormous technological leap.
If it were ever possible to directly stimulate the areas that produce images, sounds, movement, or emotions, we would no longer need a screen, headphones, or a room.
The movie would take place inside us.
We wouldn't just see a character feel fear. We would feel their fear.
We wouldn't just observe a memory. We would remember it as if it were our own.
We could experience someone else's life for two hours and return with emotions difficult to separate from our own story.
Then cinema would reach its most perfect form, and also its most dangerous one.
The danger of preferring the movie
If an experience can make us feel more alive than our own life, some people will not want to leave it.
Within a personalized movie, we could be younger, more attractive, braver, or more important. We could bring back someone who died, converse with a perfect replica of that person, and live a version of history where we never lost them.
What would happen next, when we have to return to reality?
Until now, cinema has been a lie we accept for a few hours, knowing it's a lie. But if the mind can no longer fully distinguish the cinematic experience from an authentic memory, that protection will disappear.
The problem won't be that the future resembles a movie. The problem will be that the movie turns out to be preferable to the future.
We must also ask ourselves who controls the experience. A film that knows our fears, desires, and memories will possess extremely intimate information. It could move us, manipulate us, or insert advertising in ways we would consider unbearable today.
It would no longer be enough to simply warn that a work contains violence, sex, or adult language. It would be necessary to explain what emotions it intends to evoke, what information it presents, and what psychological consequences it might produce.
A horror movie from the future wouldn't just show us a nightmare. It could construct the nightmare specifically for us.
Will the theaters disappear?
Interestingly, the more individual and personalized the home experience becomes, the more important the movie theater might become.
If each person receives a different movie, there will come a time when we will need to share the same story again.
There will be something special about sitting with strangers and accepting that no one can change what's going to happen. We'll all see the same image, hear the same dialogue, and reach the same ending together.
The traditional movie theater could survive, just as printed books, theater, and vinyl records have. Not because it's the most advanced technology, but because it offers an experience we don't want to lose.
Perhaps in a hundred years some people will still be buying popcorn, sitting in an armchair, and staring at a flat screen. For them, it will be an almost antiquated choice, but also a form of relaxation: for two hours they won't have to make any decisions.
The movie will take control again.
Cinema will survive its own demise
I don't know exactly what cinema will be like in a hundred years. Nobody can know. Many technologies that seem inevitable today could fail, and others that we haven't even imagined yet could change everything.
But I don't think cinema will disappear.
The screen can disappear. The cameras, the projectors, and even the human actors can disappear. The film could cease to be a fixed work and become a world that is built as we experience it.
Even so, something will remain.
Someone will still need to tell a story, and someone will still want to leave their own life for a few hours to enter it.
It began long before there was cinema. It began around the fire, when one person told a story and the others imagined they were there.
Technology has spent more than a century trying to make that fire look more and more real.
Perhaps in a hundred years I will achieve it.
And then we won't ask what movie we're going to see anymore.
We will ask, "Which one do we want to live in?"
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