‘Flirting’ with the audience: Broadway Cinematheque’s participation, play, and affective economics on Threads

This article presents Broadway Cinematheque, Hong Kong’s arthouse cinema, as a case study of a brand-participatory affective economics enabled by social media. Since the launch of Threads in 2023, Broadway Cinematheque has become an active participant in the local online film network with its cinephile-like persona and witty promotional strategies. Meanwhile, audiences frequently reference the cinema or appropriate its content for self-expression and play. Focussing on their engagement practices and the platform mediality of Threads, this article argues that Broadway Cinematheque does not simply exploit audiences but ‘flirts’ with them in intimate, playful, and performative ways. By delineating four forms of ‘flirting’ between the cinema and its audiences – participatory intimacy, nostalgic appropriation, myth-making play, and ironic self-roasting, it formulates ‘flirting’ as a highly networked, participatory, and contingent mode of engagement embedded in the platform mediality of Threads. Because of this contingency, it has the potential to open up ways of meaning making and affective patterning of the audience that redistribute, overspill, or destabilise the cinema’s economics.