When the Pope and Hollywood Talk Reels: A Plea for Theatres and the Stories They Hold
On a sun-washed morning in Vatican City, beneath frescoes that have witnessed centuries of whispered confessions and public proclamations, an unusual congregation gathered: film stars in black coats, a director known for his streetwise Brooklyn cadence, and a pontiff speaking not only of souls but of story-saturated dark rooms where strangers hush together.
Pope Leo XIV — the first American to sit in the chair of St. Peter — welcomed an eclectic parade of actors, directors and producers into the Vatican’s generous listening rooms. Cate Blanchett, Monica Bellucci, Chris Pine and Spike Lee were among the guests; the conversation that followed was equal parts pastoral and practical. It was about more than celluloid nostalgia. It was a summons: protect the communal act of watching a movie.
“When you step into a theatre,” the Pope told the crowd, his voice soft but decisive, “you cross a threshold where the world outside recedes and the world inside expands. That shared hush is itself a language of hope.”
It is an image that, in many cities today, feels fragile. Multiplex marquees dim. Single-screen neighbourhood cinemas shutter their doors. Streaming platforms swell with content, algorithms learning our likes and feeding us ever more of the very thing that won us over. In that landscape, the Pope’s remarks were part pastoral encouragement and part cultural alarm bell.
A century and three decades of light and shadow
This year marks roughly 130 years since the Lumière brothers first astonished a Parisian audience with moving pictures — an anniversary the Vatican used to underline how cinema has matured from a technical trick into a form that probes our deepest questions. The Pope framed movies not as mere entertainment but as a public art with civic value: a place where slowness, silence and difference can find room to breathe.
“Art resists the tyranny of the algorithm,” he said, warning that when culture is guided only by predictive engines, we risk shrinking the imagination to what is already known to succeed. “True storytelling creates possibility, not just consumption.”
Numbers that tell a tougher story
Behind the rhetoric are stubborn figures. Across many countries, box-office revenues remain below pre-pandemic peaks. Attendance in North America — the traditional engine of global commercial cinema — has yet to fully rebound to 2019 levels, and this past summer was widely reported as one of the weakest in decades for multiplexes in the United States and Canada. Industry analysts say that while blockbuster events can still draw crowds, mid-sized films and local programming struggle to find screens.
“Streaming has been a lifeline for many studios, but it’s also reconfigured how we value shared viewing,” said Dr. Rajiv Menon, an economist who studies cultural infrastructure. “The challenge now is translating the diffuse, at-home audience into support for local screens that anchor neighborhoods.”
Municipal cultural officers point out that neighbourhood cinemas are more than leisure venues; they are small engines of local economies and social life. Luisa Rossi, who has run a small arthouse cinema on Rome’s Pigneto strip for twenty years, remembers when the evening passeggiata always ended at her ticket counter.
“People came for films and lingered for dinner,” she said, folding her hands as though counting an invisible ledger. “Now the kids stream on their phones, and landlords see a vacancy as an opportunity. When we lose a cinema, we lose a place where ideas and generations meet.”
Voices in the room — and on the street
The Pope did not merely issue a call to policymakers; he pleaded directly to film artists to keep their craft honest. “Confront hard truths,” he urged. “Do not exploit pain, but permit it to be recognised and made meaningful.” After the formal remarks, those present shared private moments and gifts — Spike Lee presented the pontiff with a New York Knicks jersey bearing the playful inscription “Pope Leo 14” — a small, human punctuation to a day of earnest debate.
Cate Blanchett, speaking later to reporters, reflected on the moral responsibility of storytellers. “Cinema is public empathy,” she said. “It’s where you practice standing in someone else’s shoes for two hours. That practice matters — to artists and to citizens.”
In a narrow street outside the Vatican, a film student named Ana Morales flipped through notes, eyes bright. “I grew up watching movies in a tiny barrio cinema,” she told me. “Those seats were my first window to the wider world. If those places vanish, what replaces them? A playlist curated by an invisible hand?”
What’s at stake — and what can be done
The Pope urged institutions, civic leaders and industry players to cooperate: subsidies for historic screens, tax incentives for restoring single-screen theatres, partnerships between distributors and municipal programming, even community ownership models like cooperatives. These are not new ideas, but they have renewed urgency.
“If the faith lives in the daily gestures of people, the culture survives in daily gatherings,” said Monsignor Paolo Ferri, a Vatican cultural adviser. “A cinema is a cathedral of the modern imagination. It deserves protection.”
Practical pilots are already underway in some cities. Barcelona has supported neighbourhood cinemas with small grants for refurbishment. Seoul has encouraged single-screen houses to program local-language films and community events. In the U.S., several independent chains have experimented with hybrid models: theatrical windows followed by limited streaming runs that return revenue to local exhibitors.
- Local subsidy and tax breaks for historic cinemas
- Agreements between distributors and independents for fairer screen allocation
- Community ownership models for at-risk theatres
- Programming that ties films to local conversations and education
Why this matters beyond box office
At its heart, the Vatican meeting was less about nostalgia than about the social function of shared spaces in an atomized age. When digital life fractures attention into private compartments, public rituals — rituals as modest as sitting together in the dark — stitch us back into civic life.
Ask yourself: when was the last time you looked up from your phone and found strangers shedding a single emotion at the same cue? When a screen dims and a hush falls, something civic happens. We practice empathy. We witness. We leave transformed in small ways that add up.
Pope Leo’s plea was also an invitation — to audiences, artists, and policymakers — to recognize that culture is a commons worth tending. The films he shared as favorites — an old musical that asks us to sing, a warm-hearted classic about second chances, and a World War II drama that confronts sorrow with tenderness — are a varied set. They suggest that cinema’s value is not just in spectacle but in its capacity to hold us.
The conversation that began in a Vatican hall will not, by itself, save every marquee. But it regenerates the language we use to describe what a movie theatre is: not merely a business, but a public good, an arena of imagination where hope can quietly be set in motion. If you love film — or simply the idea of public life — what will you do next to keep those dark rooms lit?
