noteworthy wrote:
Do you see any parallels here?

Were these works of art, or were they commodities? The distinction had become blurry.

The industry does care; the people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do.

Some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. "It’s not so much that movies are dead, as that history has already passed them by."

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

In 1975, the average cost of marketing for a movie distributed by a major studio was two million dollars. In 2003, it was thirty-nine million dollars.

The primary target for the blockbuster is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids.

A great film in a fine theatre is a wonderful experience. Unfortunately, ringing cellphones and rude a$$holes who can't refrain from conversation during a movie have ruined it for a lot of us. Since the studios already make more revenue from DVD sales than theater runs, I am at a bit of a loss as to why DVD/PPV distribution still lags the cinema release date by 60-180 days.

IconoclasT wrote:

I am at a bit of a loss as to why DVD/PPV distribution still lags the cinema release date by 60-180 days.

I think its because a theatre run actally boosts sales on home video. The "direct to home video" route is reserved for most (not all) films that got poor reviews in front of test audiences. In the eyes of most people, films that go straight to DVD/PPV are seen as average at best, and more likely than not "crap".

Where as a national theatre run will pre-hype a film before it goes into the video stores.

LB

noteworthy wrote:

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

The industry is short sighted (as usual).

In 1946, no one had television or Internet. Cinema was how you "watched the news" and there weren't nearly the multitude of other entertainment options then as there are now competing for everyones money.

25 million people out of nearly 300 million - better than one in twelve Americans is in a movie theatre once a week. Not too damn bad at all by my calculations. Not when you factor in the fact that people are getting taken to the tune of $5 for a bucket of popcorn; $5 for about 5 CENTS worth of product.

Going to the pictures is EXPENSIVE. Lets see... I can pay $50 to take my family to go watch it in a theatre, or I can wait and BUY the DVD for $15 in a couple months and watch it any time in my OWN theatre. Hmmm...

Of course part of the high cost of a movie ticket is the costs of distributing a film on celluloid. Digital cinema will drasticly reduce the costs of distribution, but its currently stuck in a catch-22 situation. Theatres dont wanna pony up $120,000 for a DLP projector unless they have movies (besides Star Wars) to show on them. Studios don't want to bother with digital releases unless there is a substantial number of screens they can play on...

Blockbuster is NOT the end of cinema. Its the same song they have been singing for the past ~25 years. When home VCRS came out in the late 70's "Oh, who is gonna bother to go to the theatre when they can watch it at home?"

I think the days of the 35 bazillion screen mega-plexes might be coming to an end, and maybe somewhat of a return to the larger theatres with fewer screens.

LB