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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Topic: Your opinion on the future of exhibition
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Aaron Mehocic
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 804
From: New Castle, PA, USA
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 11-19-2005 08:33 PM
No, the success of such a revolt is "impossible". What I simply meant was your situations in which average workers are phased out by technology is very much a doomsday senario by any means. Historically, of course, this has happened, but there was always some recourse for the displaced worker. In my European courses I teach the peasant became the colonist. In the American courses, the manufacturing sector became the service sector. But in this post-industrial age, what recourse does the displaced worker have?
I'm not a communist, nor do I consider myself a pin-head academic, yet I'm not so sure I'm ready to admit I'm a peasant . . .
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 11-19-2005 10:37 PM
While "alternative content" has possibilities, the type of content still has to be appropriate for a commercial theater and be worth the price of a ticket.
To give another angle on it, certain event movies come along that get reactions from people, "I'm going to have to see that one on the big screen." I remember hearing that comment in regard to "Independence Day" and the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Lots of movies get the opposite reaction, "that's one to wait for on video, if I bother to see it at all."
Sporting events are often mentioned as alternative content for video projection equipped movie theaters. I don't think that idea will fly because sport bar & grille type venues already offer that kind of programming, even pay per view programming, for free. And you get to drink beer, eat food and chat with your friends while you watch. Movie theaters don't provide that kind of environment.
I suppose some live, pay per view concerts could attract an audience. But what currently popular music act is going to draw people to a movie theater to watch a concert via satellite? Internet broadcasts are already popular and that domination will increase as computing technology relentlessly improves and Internet bandwidth gets much faster.
My opinion is the alternative content movie theaters may have to provide is certain presentations that cannot be easily duplicated at home or in a restaurant. Large format is one option. I've seen some fairly wild multimedia presentations, laser shows and other stuff like that from time to time. That can draw pretty good crowds if promoted properly.
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Paul Linfesty
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1383
From: Bakersfield, CA, USA
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted 11-22-2005 08:22 AM
Here is L.A. Times take on the future (and present) of exhibition.
THE BIG PICTURE
In a losing race with the zeitgeist
The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close.
Patrick Goldstein
The Big Picture
November 22, 2005
Showbiz people are prone to exaggeration, but when everybody is exaggerating about the same thing, you know something bad is happening. There's a dark cloud of unease hovering over Hollywood. A top CAA agent calls it "mayhem." A studio marketer says "it feels like Armageddon." A production chief puts it this way: "Each weekend there's more blood in the water."
Malcolm Gladwell might call it a tipping point.
The era of moviegoing as a mass audience ritual is slowly but inexorably drawing to a close, eroded by many of the same forces that have eviscerated the music industry, decimated network TV and, yes, are clobbering the newspaper business. Put simply, an explosion of new technology — the Internet, DVDs, video games, downloading, cellphones and iPods — now offers more compelling diversion than 90% of the movies in theaters, the exceptions being "Harry Potter"-style must-see events or the occasional youth-oriented comedy or thriller.
Anywhere you look, the news has been grim. Disney just reported a $313-million loss for films and DVDs in its fiscal fourth quarter. Sony has had a disastrous year, with only one $100-million hit ("Hitch") among a string of costly flops. DreamWorks not only has had theatrical duds but also saw its stock plummet when its "Shrek 2" DVD sales fell 5 million short of expectations. Even Warners, the industry's best-run studio, laid off 400 staffers earlier this month.
Although the media have focused on the economic issues behind this slump, the problem is cultural too. It's become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much — the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall. When MPAA chief Dan Glickman goes to colleges, preaching his anti-piracy gospel, kids hiss, telling him his efforts don't help the public, only a few rich media giants. Say what you will about their logic, but, as anyone in the music business can attest, those sneers are the deadly sign of a truly disgruntled consumer.
There are still optimists who say the sky isn't falling, who insist that a few hits will turn things around, or gas prices will come down, or that the business being off 7% this year has more to do with the absence of a left-field sensation such as "The Passion of the Christ" than a long-term decline in moviegoing.
To them, I say — go ye to Costco or Best Buy and watch the giant HDTVs zooming out the door, the TVs that used to cost $7500 that now go for $1995 and allow middle-class people to have a marvelous moviegoing experience right at home without $10.50 tickets, $4 popcorn, 20 minutes of annoying commercials and some guy in the next row yakking away on his cellphone.
Once people spend all that money on a home entertainment system, they've got to feed the machine. I've watched friends who used to regularly go to theaters mutate into adjunct professors in DVD-ology, scanning the ads for the new video releases and rhapsodizing over Netflix the way other people swoon over TiVo or XM radio.
This only highlights the biggest crack in the system: that most of the movies in theaters don't deserve a theatrical release, at least not by the rules of today's game. Until the DVD and pay TV money kicks in, they're money losers. Yet the studios are forced to spend more marketing money every year to chase after increasingly resistant moviegoers, then go dark for months before spending another big chunk to remind people the DVD has arrived.
The studios have no one but themselves to blame. Motivated, as always, by an obsession with quarterly earnings, they began shrinking the DVD window from nine months to six months to 90 days. Universal's "The Skeleton Key," which opened in theaters in mid-August, made its DVD debut last week, barely three months later. When the six-month window still held sway, the theater beckoned — half a year felt like a long time away. Three months seems like just around the corner. All too many movies, even ones with big stars in them, including "The Weather Man," "In Her Shoes" and "Dreamer," have died on the vine, with millions of Americans staring at the TV spots and thinking, "I'll wait and see that on DVD."
And that's just the adult side of the equation. What's really driving the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core constituency — young moviegoers — has evaporated. Poof! They've scattered to the winds. Young males aren't just AWOL from movie theaters, they're also not seeing the studio's TV ads — either because they've stopped watching TV altogether, or because they've got the TV, iPod and IM all going at the same time — not exactly a situation in which an ad leaves much of an imprint. The only movies that are reliable drawing cards today are behemoths such as "War of the Worlds" or "Harry Potter," or cheap youth-oriented genre films such as "Saw II" or "The 40 Year-Old Virgin."
One of the movie industry's crucial failings is that it's simply too slow to keep up with the lightning speed of new technology. Who would've believed six months ago that the day after "Desperate Housewives" aired on ABC you could download the whole show on your video iPod? But when someone pitches a movie, it takes at least 18 to 24 months — if not far longer — between conception and delivery to the movie theaters. In a world now dominated by the Internet, studios are at a huge disadvantage in terms of ever lassoing the zeitgeist. Everybody is making movies based on video games, but it seems clear from the abject failure of movies such as "Doom" that it's almost impossible, given the slow pace of filmmaking, to launch a video game movie before the game has started to lose its sizzle.
New technology is also accelerating word of mouth. Thanks to instant messaging and BlackBerries, bad buzz about a bad movie hits the streets fast enough to stop suckers from lining up to see a new stinker. Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with reality.
That's the only explanation for why Sony Pictures could've imagined there was any compelling reason this summer to see a wan remake of "Bewitched." Or why any of the studio's highly paid executives didn't wonder why it should shoehorn an obscure family movie into the one-week window between the Disney-powered "Chicken Little" and the latest "Harry Potter" juggernaut, especially when the movie, "Zathura," has a title that sounds like it should be followed by the warning "side effects may include leakage or sexual dysfunction."
The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble — ahem, your customers — who spend $75 to take the family to a movie. Too often studio people have the same ideas about the same things, a groupthink that has led to them anointing one Hot New Thing after another, from Josh Hartnett to Brittany Murphy to Kate Hudson to Colin Farrell, who've yet to connect with rank 'n file filmgoers.
What should studios do to come to grips with this new era? In a world bursting at the seams with new technology, it's hard to justify the antiquated idea of studio development, which keeps churning out movies such as "Be Cool," an Elmore Leonard novel from 1999 that was hilariously out of date by the time it reached theaters, having a storyline that revolved around Chili Palmer's exploits in the music business, perhaps the least cool place on the planet.
Hollywood needs a new mindset, one that sees a movie as something that comes in all shapes and sizes, not something that is wedded to the big screen. Studios have to do what record companies refused to do until they nearly went out of business: embrace the future.
People increasingly want to see movies on their terms, today on a big TV at home, tomorrow on an iPod or cellphone. It breaks my heart that people have fallen out of love with movie theaters, but if I were king, I'd start releasing any movie with multi-generational appeal on DVD at the same time it hit theaters, so the kids could get out of the house and the parents could watch at home.
The music business has already adopted this two-tier system, selling downloads and CDs simultaneously. TV networks are starting to do the same thing with their shows. It's only a matter of time before movies are forced to do the same. The day isn't far away — desperation being a great motivator for innovation — when a studio opens a blockbuster on Friday in theaters and on Saturday on pay-per-view (at $75 a shot) so fans could watch it with a bunch of friends at home.
As it stands, Hollywood has become a prisoner of a corporate mindset that is squeezing the entrepreneurial vitality out of the system. It's not just that studios are making bad movies — they've been doing that for years. They've lost touch with any real cultural creativity. When you walk down the corridors at Apple or a video game company, there's an electricity in the air that encourages people into believing they could dream up a new idea that could blow somebody's mind.
At the big studios, the creative voltage is sometimes so low that you wonder if you've wandered into an insurance office. The dreamers have left the building. Back in the 1950s, David Selznick, out walking one night with Ben Hecht, glumly said, "Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbling pyramids. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands." As I said, show people like to exaggerate, but these days when I go around Hollywood, I can see the crumbling pyramids too.
"The Big Picture" runs Tuesdays in Calendar. Comments or criticism can be e-mailed to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.
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Dave Williams
Wet nipple scene
Posts: 1836
From: Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Registered: Jan 2000
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posted 11-22-2005 09:52 AM
This article has many truths to it, however misses one all important truth; movies cost money to make.
Movie studios are well aware that they cannot make thier money back by dumping theatrical exhibition and the window they grant it. The problem is that as the window shrinks, so does the money garnered from the theater showings, making the DVD sales that much more important.
The music industry rightfully went through this downfall, as the price of cd's was way too expensive, and the cost of producing albums became problematic. Fans still saw live shows in support of the album by the artist, and the price of downloading individual songs has leveled the playing field for the consumer.
The movie industry will have a much more difficult time adjusting to "new technologies" than the music industry did. This involves a medium that is visual and audio, not just audio as its primary source. Visuals cost money, and money is precisely what the consumer is trying to avoid paying. There has to be balance, and the consumer is not bright enough to realize that they will not get any better quality movie or experience by demanding cheaper and quicker content.
The studios need to adopt a different philosophy here. First of all, start paying actors based on returns, not on thier expected draw. This will reduce production budgets, and allow for actors to start attaching to films that have a greater chance for higher returns instead of to any old film because they pay them ungodly millions just for walking onto the sound stage.
Secondly, the DVD release window should be directly proportionate to the first four weeks returns. If a film tanks in four weeks, then by all means get it to DVD as soon as possible, making room in the theater for some other movie to try its game.
Let's forget this same day dvd or pay per view release window crap. It will kill movie theaters in the long run, which is 60 percent of the industries money. It would be suicide. It is much different than shutting down all those mom and pop record stores, they didn't present the music, they just sold it. The theater provides a unique viewing experience. No matter how you slice it, no one can fit a 60 foot screen and a sound system designed by nasa and run from the space station into thier living room. A 42 inch plasma screen is not a movie theater, and anyone who thinks so is deluding themselves.
Ciao
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 11-22-2005 01:46 PM
That article had a lot of really good points, with a few that were off the mark as well.
I would agree that the studios are shooting theaters in the foot with the smaller release windows, but I don't necessarily think that gun is also aiming back at them. So long as people enjoy watching movies, movie makers will exist in some form. I don't think that theaters have the same assurance of survival, because they're caught in the crossfire.
Perhaps it's just my local market (Milwaukee, WI), but I don't think I have ever seen a TV ad for a theater. Why not? It's common marketing sense that you have to advertise to get business, and when business is slow and money is tight, you need to advertise even more.
Around here, the only theater advertising I've ever seen has been in the traditional newspaper movie section. Everyone who thinks that newspaper is where your customers are, raise your hands ![[uhoh]](graemlins/uhoh.gif)
I'd be interested in hearing about alternatives that theaters have used to newspaper. Have you tried online advertising, TV, or radio? How about those ValPak coupon packs that get sent out? What has worked, and what hasn't?
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