With the last of the summer blockbusters fading from the multiplex, Hollywood's box office slump has hardened into a reality that is setting the movie industry on edge. The drop in ticket sales from last summer to this summer, the most important moviegoing season, is projected to be 9 percent by Labor Day, and the drop in attendance is expected to be even deeper, 11.5 percent, according to Exhibitor Relations, which tracks the box office.Statistics like that tend to concentrate the minds of movie executives.
Multiple theories for the decline abound: a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough.[Emphasis mine]
You don't say! But, of course, that has been true for a long time. What accounts for the recent decline?
The answer is..., tada! Home theatres.
There is a dirty little secret in all of this. The studios are doing fine. Sales of DVD's have been booming for several years, though they seem to have stabilized recently -- it is the theatre chains that are hurting, and they have been separate from the studios since 1948.
Studios and theatre chains have very differenc sets of interests, a fact that is highlighted by a recent suggestion by Robert Iger, incoming head of Disney Studios, that DVD versions of movies be released simultaneously with their theatrical release. This, theatre owners, constitutes nothing less than a "death threat" from the studios.
But Iger is right -- that seems to be what consumers want. Why? The technology of home entertainment has at last reached a point where people can produce in their own livingrooms something that approximates the theatrical experience.
Warren Lieberfarb, a former Warner Brothers executive who was a main advocate of the DVD in the early 90's, warned that going to the movies had become too expensive over all, given the excellent quality of home theater. "It's not just the DVD. It's not just the DVD window," he said. "It's the flat-panel television and the sound system, with the DVD option, that has radically changed the quality of the in-home experience. The home theater has arrived." As a result, he said, "you have to change the business model of the movie business."Until that happens, movie executives are responding to the crisis by promising to make better movies. I sure hope they do, but haven't we heard this before..., several times. I'll believe it when I see it.
In the meantime it's interesting to speculate on how theatre chains will adjust to the changing market conditions. Many won't survive, but I suspect that those that do will begin be those that go back to the roots of the movie industry.
In the early decades of the movie industry films were shown either in easily accessible, affordable formats [nickelodeons] or as part of a broader, more varied entertainment mix [in vaudeville shows or as part of an evening's entertainment that included singing, cartoons, door prize drawings, live acts and announcers, etc. in movie "palaces"] Eventually the latter practice prevailed.
This practice of providing a varied slate of entertainment continued right up to the 1940's and beyond. Perhaps it is time to revive it now. Just showing a feature film along with some commercials just doesn't cut it any more. Some theatre chains and revival houses are beginning to move in that direction. The key will be to offer people something that they would find too troublesome or expensive to replicate in their own homes.
Now the question is -- what form will it take? Who can know at this point. But..., whatever the outcome, the next couple of decades promise to be an immensely exciting period of experimenation and innovation in the field of public entertainment. I look forward to it eagerly.
Read the article here.
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