I believe that films are portals and postcards of the time they are made in – and at their very best, the stories we tell have the ability not just to reflect culture, but to shift it.

Tessa Thompson
Actor

In a movie theatre, you watch movies with the significant others in your life, but also in the company of strangers…when the experience makes us laugh or cry or cheer or contemplate, then when the lights come up and we leave our seats, the people with whom we head out into the real world don’t feel like strangers anymore. We’ve become a community.

Steven Spielberg
Director

I want the ethereal rush where the movie is a dream and the crowd around me is like a guitar amp plugged into my own reactions. It’s hard to get that on your couch in your well-lit living room with an iPad next to you. That’s what I miss about going to the cinema.

Rian Johnson
Director

I believe that when we are on the other side of Covid, there will be a powerful need to be together. The cinema will, perhaps more than ever before, be a place to celebrate, to congregate, and to appreciate films and each other.

JJ Abrams
Director

The movie experience is, of course, more than the play of light on a screen, it happens in the hearts and minds and viscera of an audience… Cinema is public dreaming vividly shared. Whichever way we care to receive our screen stories, nothing can match the theatrical experience.

George Miller
Director

If movies stop being shown in cinemas they are diminished, and however big their budget is, each film will become smaller and smaller. Collective experiences shape our lives and although I am clearly biased, movies bring us together.

Daniel Craig
Actor

There is simply no substitute for seeing a movie in the dark with a few hundred strangers… It’s not just part of the experience, it can often be the very heart of the experience itself.

Christopher McQuarrie
Director