The days of cinema-going may be numbered, thanks to home movie systems - don't write them off just yet, writes John Patterson
Ever the revolutionary-by-degrees, Steven Soderbergh this week releases his latest movie, Bubble, a low-budget drama starring nonprofessionals, simultaneously in cinemas, on pay-cable TV and on DVD. It's significant that he has chosen to conduct this experiment using one of his "one for me" movies (think Schizopolis or Full Frontal) rather than a "one for the suits" film (say, Ocean's Thirteen). But it nonetheless suggests that the days of conventional movie distribution may be numbered.
Ever since the advent of home video a quarter-century ago, which gave studios an equivalent to the publishing industry's distinction between the release of the snooty hardback and the populist paperback, the normal pattern for a new release is first to let it take its chances with audiences in cinemas. After a decent interval, the movie is then made available on video, and now DVD; these days, that is where about half of most movies' receipts are generated. Recently, however, that interval has become significantly shorter, with some releases appearing on DVD as early as six weeks after their moviehouse debuts.
Does this mean that cinema releases now function merely as trailers for DVD releases, or that conventional movie-going has become such a sterile, "fast-food" experience that movie lovers would now rather wait out that shortening interlude and enjoy the movie two months later in the comfort of their homes, bathed in the livid glare of their state-of-the-art home-projection systems?
IT HAS LONG been the belief of critics that the collective, quasi-tribal rite of seeing a movie alongside 500 strangers, with THX and Dolby on a 20-metre-wide screen, is what matters, compared with the solitary, miniaturised domestic version. But the decline of the cinema experience - now blighted by adverts, iffy projection quality and mobile-phone beeps - has been offset by improvements in the technical quality of home viewing: digital projectors, HDTV, horizon-wide plasma screens and five-speaker surround sound.
We shouldn't write off conventional cinema-going yet, though. Billions are still made for the studios with simultaneous worldwide releases, and arguments are raging as to whether the slumps in box-office receipts (down 5 per cent in 2005) and audience attendance (down 8 per cent) are a mere statistical blip or part of a steepening decline. I think it's a steady decline, as the 2004 box-office figures were massively distorted by The Passion of the Christ, which drew habitually non-movie-going Christians into theatres for a one-time-only religious bloodbath.
A complicating factor is the conversion of cinemas to digital projection and distribution. It costs a lot to duplicate and deliver bulky celluloid prints to cinemas, and far less to beam a movie by satellite or mail a saucer-sized disc to moviehouses. But the savings will all go into the distributors' pockets while the cost of conversion to digital projection will fall upon the wretched exhibitors, who currently earn only a minute fee from ticket sales and must balance the books with concession-stand sales. At the very least, the price of popcorn will keep rising.
FOR THE RECORD, my favourite film-going experiences of 2005 were seeing Terrence Malick's transcendent The New World in a large, sumptuous, and nearly empty screening room in Beverly Hills (the idea of seeing this masterpiece on an iPod just brings me out in hives), and catching A History of Violence on a Saturday night at the local multiplex - those same giggling drunk teenagers who have improved many a gross-out comedy classic for me clammed right up after the cafe-killings.
But best of all was showing Joseph Losey's The Servant to a group of people in a friend's crowded livingroom in Echo Park, on a superb $2,000 DVD projection-system. The drink flowed, the nauseating smell of popcorn butter did not prevail, and some spirited arguments and even a near fistfight ensued.
It's a long time since I've had that much fun going to the cinema. - (Guardian service)