Daily Inspiration Quote by Leonard Maltin

Movie theaters "still exist" is the tell: Maltin isn’t celebrating triumph so much as registering surprise at survival. Coming from a career critic whose authority was built in the age of schedules, physical media, and shared release calendars, the line reads like a field note from someone watching the ground shift under his profession. He piles up alternatives in a breathless inventory - "video and video-on-demand and DVD and streaming video" - not to clarify but to dramatize abundance. The repetition works as a kind of consumer noise, an accelerating list that mimics the way choice now crowds out ritual.

The intent is modest, almost stubbornly empirical: despite the tech churn, the theatrical experience hasn’t been fully obsoleted. But the subtext is more anxious. "In spite of" frames the home-viewing revolution as a siege, and theaters as an institution that should, by pure market logic, have collapsed by now. That’s less nostalgia than a recognition that movies aren’t only content; they’re a social technology. The theater persists because it packages attention: you buy darkness, scale, and a temporary agreement with strangers to shut up and watch.

Context matters here: Maltin is speaking from the long arc of media formats that promised replacement and delivered coexistence. His sentence carries the critic’s implicit defense of cinema as an event, not an endlessly resumable file. The point isn’t that streaming failed; it’s that convenience didn’t kill craving for the occasional, expensive, communal night out - even if it now has to justify itself every weekend.