I’ve long thought that the American movie theatre industry is marked for death (or changes so drastic as to be indistinguishable from death), mainly because of the stupid things they’re doing to offset declining ticket sales. The road to recovery is not to charge more for everything and force people to sit through more and more commercials. Somehow that fairly obvious fact has managed to escape most everybody, save the consumers, who are staying away in droves.
All of this is why I reacted to news about 2929 with glee—even despite the involvement of Mark Cuban. If you haven’t heard, the basic premise is to release a movie to theatres, DVD and pay-per-view at the same time. Simple idea, profound consequences. This way the studio/filmmaker only pays for one marketing blitz, and the consumer is free to decide how they want to see the movie. Which is completely brilliant. And I don’t just say this because I haven’t been to a movie theatre in over three years and would like to see them die because I have a general hate-on for companies that openly disrespect their consumers.
The most important, bestest thing about this is that, should it become common practice, the cost of getting a movie to the consumer will go down. Movies are on the verge of being democratized by the ready availability of high-quality tools (though it’s not quite there yet), and the prohibitive investment required to actually make money off of a movie is increasingly a major stumbling block for a lot of artists.
With the potential downfall of the current distribution model, a film could skip the theatres and still be taken seriously and get eyeballs. A film only available on DVD, pressed by the director in his basement, could be reviewed in publications of high standing right next to the latest from the major studios. And more importantly, it could reviewed in publications of low standing, you know, the ones that most of America actually reads. It could even share shelf space at Blockbuster, which is a bad example because Blockbuster isn’t long for this world either, but you get what I mean.
Admittedly, this is all conjecture, based upon my own wishful thinking. But I do see a major hurdle ahead for this ‘distribution revolution.’ The theatres themselves have whittled away any clout they once had, but if the studios recognize this as a threat, expect trouble. They could either band together and attempt to legislate their business model back into viability, or take advantage of their existing infrastructure to get a head start in the new scheme of things. As there have already been far too many recent examples, I think they’ll go for the former. Movie lovers will continue to be royally screwed if this happens, and that would suck.