Event-to-Event: Gold Medals on the Silver Screen
(Eventually) watching the All-Around Gymnastics competition at AMC Theatres
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When I walked into my local AMC at around 12:10pm and made my way to the designated theater, I found six people, which was two more than I had expected based on when I bought my ticket the previous evening. The screening was set to start at 12:00pm, so I was technically late, but normally that wouldn’t be an issue given that there’s at least 20 minutes (we’re creeping up on 25) of trailers and Nicole Kidman before a movie actually starts these days.1
However, this screening was different. I entered with the main event already in progress, but something was wrong. Actually, scratch that—in defense of the person who set up the screening, it was technically correct. We had purchased tickets to a live broadcast of coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, and objectively that was what we were seeing. But instead of the live NBC coverage of Simone Biles and Suni Lee battling in the Women’s All-Around Gymnastics competition and Swimming finals that had been advertised, I walked into the theater to the thrills of Canoe Slalom and Beach Volleyball on E!.
As someone who was there mainly to write this newsletter, with AMC’s A-List service meaning that it cost me nothing out of pocket, I appreciated this particular mistake. I went back out to concessions to alert the employees to the issue, knowing that there were two possibilities: either this is a central feed being sent by NBC to theaters, in which case the mistake is a global problem, or we’re just watching a cable or satellite signal and the mistake was made by whoever chose the channel. Not shockingly, the concessions worker didn’t have an answer (I made clear I didn’t expect him to), but he radioed the managers and I made my way back to the theater to see how things were holding up with my six compatriots.
The answer was “not well,” because there was another employee in the theater already—it turns out he had already been called in earlier due to a lack of air conditioning, and now he was back on the case. And while I had responded to the mistake with intellectual curiosity, these people had paid $9 to see Simone Biles on the big screen, and they knew they were at risk of missing the first apparatus. One woman there with her parents and (I believe) sister pulled it up on her phone to show the employee that it existed, while the other woman—who was there with her teenager—emphasized that they knew they could be watching it that way, but the whole point was that they wanted to see it on the big screen. As we sat in that tension, a light turned on in the projector booth above, and then the screen changed from Beach Volleyball to…a DirecTV menu.
What followed was a delightful few minutes as we tried to communicate through the employee in the theater to the employee in the projection booth—their first mistake was clicking on the “Sports” category, and then they got tripped up by MSNBC (which wasn’t showing Olympics) and USA (which was), but eventually we managed to coax this person with no cable/satellite literacy to the broadcast networks at the top of the list. I wish I could say this was the end of our ordeal, but they did first attempt to start the previous hour’s broadcast before then finally finding the correct broadcast and putting Gymnastics on the big screen just in time for Simone Biles’ vault.
It may seem as though this newsletter has all been journalistic “color” so far, but that was the whole reason I was there. I could have easily stayed at my boyfriend’s apartment with the dog to watch Simone win gold and had a pretty comparable experience. It’s been over a decade since streaming saved us from the tyranny of NBC’s tape delays, and I don’t know if there’s anything new to say about the network’s coverage of the games: every event is available live via Peacock, and while I wish some of the more minor feeds featured more engaged commentary (I truly had no idea what was going on in surfing), it’s still hard to look a gift horse in the mouth knowing how difficult NBC made watching the games within our lifetimes. Watching it on the big screen felt like the next evolution of the modern Olympics viewing experience.
What I realized during Biles’ unexpectedly tough path to gold was that I was actually reverting back to a traditional Olympics viewing experience in some ways. If I had been at home, I would have had access to Peacock’s dynamic broadcasting approaches: the Gold Zone highlights meaningful events happening across the games, while their Multiview feature lets you track four sports at once and click on one to focus when something exciting starts happening. I used the latter feature often during the early days of the tennis events, allowing me to monitor multiple players in my tennis pool at once (I’m in the lead going into the medal rounds, but it won’t stick). And even if I had been watching the gymnastics specifically, I could have switched away to other sports during lulls in activity—there were only five women who ended up being in contention for a medal, and I no doubt would have thrown over to Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime’s tennis quarter-final at various points if I had control of the remote.
I didn’t, though, and that was for the best. The whole value of these “watch parties” is to tap into the live experience of watching the Olympics, and gymnastics is the perfect edge-of-your-seat sport for that. And while I could have gone to a sports bar and probably had more people watching with me, there was something about the intimate spectacle of moviegoing that matched the moment. It was all about the sharp intakes of breath when a gymnast stumbled or fell, and the spontaneous applause when a landing was stuck—there was no one in that space who didn’t choose to be there, and while the groups did occasionally talk amongst themselves and we all spent some time on our phones between rotations, when the action was happening everyone was glued to it. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Biles’ beam routine put her back in the driver’s seat, and we all applauded when Suni Lee nailed her first tumbling pass on her floor routine on her way to a bronze medal.
That “we” is a small sample, of course. While my fellow theatergoers were obviously there specifically to watch the gymnastics, I was mostly there because it was the only day where anyone had purchased tickets in advance—as of this morning, not a single ticket has been sold at my local AMC for the daily screenings through August 11, and today’s screening (set for 1pm) was canceled between the time I checked this morning and the time I’m writing this sentence. While I wasn’t mad at the idea that I could have an entire theater to myself to watch the Olympics on a large screen, that seemed like it defeated the purpose of a watch party, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of demand for them. The groups I shared the theater with talked briefly about whether they might come back for future events, but had no concrete plans, and I’m not sure if the promised events—mainly track and field finals with some Basketball thrown in—are going to create additional mass appeal that gymnastics didn’t.
Now, to be clear, time zones mean that these screenings are happening in the afternoon (morning on the west coast), which creates a smaller pool of potential viewers. It’s also possible the situation is different in larger cities. However, despite my small sample size, I think it’s fair to call this a failure for NBC and AMC, depending on the financial agreements involved. AMC CEO Adam Aron said in a press release that they were excited to “extend NBC’s daily live coverage of the Paris Olympic Games to AMC Theatres across the country,” but no one seems to have leapt that this extended content. If AMC was trying to get Olympics viewers into theaters to buy popcorn, it doesn’t seem to be having that effect in my market.
But while I don’t have enough data to make any kind of concrete conclusions, there’s nonetheless something to take away here about our relationship with the Olympics. We’ve long been trained to perceive the Olympics as a collective experience, and that was amplified by an era of social media built on synchronous viewing. But as streaming gives viewers more control of their watch habits, our Olympics experiences are becoming more heavily individualized, and those social platforms have been inundated with a level of toxicity that makes it harder and harder to justify spending time on them during an event like this.
Case in point: when I clicked on a sponsored Facebook post about the AMC Olympics watch parties (which I was fed because I had messaged people about them on Whatsapp, thanks Meta), an alarming number of the comments were about the right wing outrage following the Opening Ceremonies and the alleged attack on Christianity that was not actually about Christianity. And while my phone allowed me to check the tennis scores during lulls in the gymnastics, it also exposed me to the online discourse yesterday surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, a female boxer whose victory over Italian Angela Carini drew an unending string of bigotry from the usual suspects of TERF-y online behavior (e.g. Trump and Rowling). While the latter situation is more nuanced than the nothing burger of the Last Supper controversy (this Slate piece has a good breakdown), there was no room for that nuance as right-wing agitators leapt to attack trans people for existing despite the fact that Khelif herself is not trans and her opponent never suggested she was (and has since expressed regret over her actions). This is the norm for spaces like Twitter these days, obviously, but the efficiency with which the Olympics spirit has been clouded over by the culture wars has been especially dispiriting.
And so perhaps, then, the best way to experience the Olympics right now would be to gather a group of your friends with A-List, head to your local AMC, turn off your phones, and enjoy the show. There’s a good chance you’ll get a private screening, at least in my corner of the world, and that means there’s no way for the occasional political advertisement to spark a conversation you don’t want to hear at a sports bar (I braced myself when a Kamala Harris ad came on during my screening). There will be no TERFs being elevated to the top of every thread, and you’ll just be able to enjoy the amazing accomplishments of Olympic athletes with that spirit of togetherness—you may be stuck with a single screen experience, and that screen might be showing the wrong channel at first, but this new-fashioned take on the old-fashioned ways may be the best path forward.
Episodic Observations
For the record, I have tried to use BlueSky as a less toxic space for Olympics discourse, but there’s just not enough activity to feel actually alive, which is ultimately what I want more than anything.
Echoing what others have said, Laurie Hernandez’s commentary was excellent during the Gymnastics final, and I’ve enjoyed seeing her TikToks behind-the-scenes as well.
If you’re not on Olympics TikTok, my feed has mostly been chocolate muffins, so the personalized nature of the algorithm does at least seem to be keeping me from that platform’s TERFs.
I wondered if my Canadianness would show too hard when the broadcast switched to swimming, but Summer Mcintosh was never really trailing on her way to a second gold medal, and my applause could easily be construed as applause for the American who finished second.
We really are in the future of broadcasting: when I clicked on the second round of the Men’s Golf event this morning, it asked me if I wanted to see selected highlights from the round thus far, which it proceeded to play for me before joining the broadcast live. We’ve come a long way from NBC’s first streaming effort back in 2012.
I still have strong feelings about NBC’s struggle to commentate events as they are rather than as platforms for Team USA propaganda, but my time at the AMC wasn’t as much of an issue in this regard because Biles and Lee were the larger story of that event, and the commentators did a nice job of covering the other gymnasts in contention.
I’ll maybe have something more to say about Deadpool & Wolverine in time, but my short version is that it ended up being far more interested in the past than the future in ways that I found surprising (and mostly effective), but also made it less of a bellwether for the MCU as a whole than I expected going in.
Unrelated, but one time my local AMC perfectly timed the “lights begin to dim” with the lights actually dimming, and every time they don’t do it I just get angry. Rude.
I'm a big fan of the whitewater canoe and kayak slaloms! And NBC's streaming coverage has been great since I can't watch live during the day so I watch at night. It's pretty easy to navigate and I can flick through and find the events I want to watch relatively easily. And I guess because I have Peacock premium or whatever I don't have to watch ads, which is clutch.
I've also been getting into the skateboarding. No idea what the commentators are saying when they name the tricks (or how they tell them apart) but I appreciate the effort.
I'm an AMC A-Lister and I probably would have gone to an Olympics screening if the timing worked out, but I'm in California so it's simply not feasible to get to a theater that early in the day especially because I am NOT a morning person.
The Olympics have been tough for me due to the time zone and the fact that I have a 4 day a week office job, but my ipad has been clutch. And I woke up at 8am voluntarily (which I never, ever do) to watch pommel horse and have been watching on my couch for the last 2.5 hrs 😬