‘Barbenheimer’ is mission impossible for Deaf film fans like me

It’s one thing having a single film become the trending topic in the pop culture scene, but when 21 July sees the release of two eagerly-anticipated movies – Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer – the box office battle has birthed the meme ‘Barbenheimer’ for those who plan to marathon the two films in one visit, something which is logistically impossible for Deaf cinemagoers.

Whichever way round you decide to watch the two films, so dire and discriminatory is the UK cinema industry that seeing one subtitled screening at an accessible time is the kind of fantasy utopia which would make Ken blush. While I’m firmly team Oppenheimer (if you must know), one of two screenings at my local Cineworld is for 4:10pm on Monday, meaning I would not only miss the hype around seeing both films on Friday if I wanted to do that, but I would have to leave work early and hope my boss doesn’t do what most employers would do and sack me on the spot.

Far from a one-off affecting Cineworld, Odeon responded to my enquiry about why there wasn’t any subtitled screenings in the first full week of release by effectively shrugging their shoulders and stating they’ll pass the feedback on. In fact, if you look beyond my own personal desire to see a brooding Cillian Murphy and look at UK cinema as a whole, subtitled cinema website YourLocalCinema returns just 10 results for subtitled screenings of Oppenheimer on Friday. For Barbie, it’s not much better, with just 14 results – none of the cinemas offer both on the same day.

The disinterest and outright discrimination exhibited by our main cinema providers is why I don’t hesitate in describing the UK cinema industry as institutionally audist – that is, discriminatory towards deaf people.

I’m not just citing the ‘Barbenheimer’ farce as an example of this, either. Cineworld announced a £3 Cineworld Day in February 2022, but only “some” cinemas would offer subtitled screenings on that one day to enable Deaf people to take advantage of the discount.

In May that year, the UK Cinema Association (UKCA) decided to offer a temporary increase in subtitled screenings for one week only as part of Deaf Awareness Week – a promotion slammed as a “publicity-seeking gimmick” by the National Deaf Children’s Society which culminated in one in four cinemas failing to show a subtitled screening at all during that week.

In the same week as the UKCA announced the promotion, the Royal National Institute for Deaf people (RNID) withdrew from the association’s Subtitling Challenge Fund to look into new subtitling technologies, citing “little progress” over a three-year period.

If it seems nonsensical that cinemas wouldn’t want as many bums on seats as possible, then that’s because it is. The view that subtitles are ‘distracting’ still permeates areas of the industry, despite them being perfectly fine when appearing on award-winning masterpiece Parasite or during the Orc scenes in The Hobbit trilogy. A YouGov survey from February found 60 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds, arguably one of the most interested demographics in the latest cinema releases – use subtitles when watching movies. That argument does not stand the test of time.

The perfect storm occurs when subtitled screenings air when Deaf people are at work, leading cinemas to argue they are not profitable to put on because no one shows up. Hearing and non-disabled people are spoilt for choice when it comes to screenings they want to see; Deaf people are not.

And the impact of that is significant – just to be clear. The ‘don’t spoil the Endgame‘ plea from the creative team behind the blockbuster Avengers finale took on a whole new meaning when you had to wait several weeks after release to see it with subtitles. The multiversal Spider-Man: No Way Home, which delighted fans of the webbed superhero by bringing back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s iterations, was yet another example, where I had to dodge spoilers like Doc Ock’s pincers and hope the pop cultural buzz hadn’t died out a week or so later (it had, and I was late to the party). Conversations with friends are pained by the fact I have to tell them not to spoil it for me, and that I still haven’t seen it yet because cinemas don’t consider my custom important enough.

Once again, deaf people are having to call on cinemas to do better. If they don’t want ticket sales from us to bomb, then they need to ditch the rose-tinted sunglasses of half-arsed tokenism and stop living in their own world.

Images: Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures/YouTube.