When I went to a screening of The Lost Bus at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, it was in a very big theater with a big screen and a big audience. The story of a bus driver and a schoolteacher getting a bus full of children to safety during California’s devastating 2018 Camp Fire, it stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, and there was quite a bit of curiosity about it. Its presentation of large fires is intense, to say the least. (The book the film is based on, Lizzie Johnson‘s Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, follows a number of stories, but the confined setting of the school bus makes this one an understandable choice to turn into a movie.)
I got on the elevator with a handful of other people to leave the theater, and as sometimes happens, there was a kind of a big exhale, just “whew,” as we unwound the tension. Someone muttered something about it being a lot to take in, and the woman standing opposite me told us that she’d just been through a fire like that recently, and she started to cry a little. By the time we got off the elevator, she seemed to have gathered herself, and she found her friends.
But I don’t know whether this experience of scale, of the intensity that we experienced in the theater, is going to be the way most people see The Lost Bus. That’s because after a couple of weeks of a fairly quiet limited theatrical release, it’s now available on Apple TV+. You can watch it on your TV, or on your laptop, or on your tablet, or on your phone.
I think we’re past general tooth-gnashing about people watching movies on non-theatrical screens having an inferior experience. It depends on the movie, it depends on the screen size you have, and it depends on the theater you’re comparing it to. There are real advantages to home viewing. You don’t have to get a babysitter, you can pause if you need to, you don’t get stuck next to people talking — we’ve had all these conversations. I don’t think it hurt CODA, Apple TV+’s best picture winner, to be seen mostly on screens in 2021. But CODA was not trying to convey the massive nature of anything in the way The Lost Bus conveys the power of fires. A disaster movie seen at home might be different from a family drama seen at home.
