The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Friday, August 17, 2007

The End Of Cinema As We Know It?!

Well???

George Merchan: The summer movie season is going to finally come to a close soon. So what were the legitimate phenomenas? I don't know, were there any? Record-breaking numbers aside, I wouldn't say it was May's big three (Spidey, Pirates, Shrek). And as grotesquely brilliant as Transformers was, I wouldn't say it was either. I think Knocked Up may be the only film that's really done what every studio wishes a film would do, which is be made for relatively cheap and sprout gorgeously supple legs. Then again, I don't think that's true either. For the big films (budgeted, at the very least, between 150-200 mil), it's all about the opening weekend. The studios know there's going to be a huge drop-off, so they spend inordinate amounts of cash promoting for that first weekend blitz. And though on the following Mondays you hear all about the broken records and copious amounts of cash pouring out of studio executive ass, we ultimately find out that a lot of films only barely make it to the black. After all is said and done, it's kinda obvious that movies aren't the best kind of investment around. Shit, I think I could've put 150 million into a high-yielding money market account and still have made more bank than Evan Almighty.

I think maybe the better question would be, "The End of the Ludicrous Blockbuster Business Model As We Know It?!" I haven't even started talking about convergence in media and the increased avenues of choice and immediacy that we as consumers now have when getting our entertainment.

Doug Slack: I think we're still in for a lot more OMG HUGE BLOCKBUSTERS. And I think that's partly due to all the recent advances in home viewing widgets. People who get the state of the art home theater systems need the biggest, loudest, bestest DVD's to utilize all their toys. You don't buy surround sound speakers to watch Waitress. You buy them, along with a 20 ft. flat screen, to watch Transformers. THAT'S a flick that'll shake your house, wake your neighbors and fuck their dog.

So the big blockbusters will continue to open big because everybody likes to come out to see the next spectacle. Then they'll sell like crazy on DVD so the ever growing number of home theater owners can impress their friends.

Andrew Clarke: Purely from the numbers, with all the big films aiming for and hitting $300m - a number that was still very rare only a few years ago - suggests that the studios have never been better at this blockbuster malarkey. In fact every film, down to Die Hard 4, has done as well or slightly better than expected. But then none of those big movies were particularly seen as triumphs. Despite the astronomical returns, they all merely 'met expectations', and all will rely on DVD to really bring the profits home. Much was made of Superman Returns' $250m price tag, but Pirates 3's $300m was seen as almost a given.

It would be nice to think that the guys holding the purse strings really know what they are doing. Even if a film costs $500m, if it takes in $1bn for the studio, it is still a sound decision, business wise. The trend is still towards bigger though, and inflationary bubbles will always lead to a moment of 'pop'. One of the producers of Spidey 3 was very reticent about it's budget when figures were leaked, calling it something like 'obscene'.

And however little we know about the real numbers in Hollywood's incredibly opaque accounting, the move to the home market is clear, and that can only lead to a long tail market where lots of things are bought by a few people rather than one thing being bought by everyone.

It all points to this inflationary model of ever bigger, ever more risky tentpoles becoming massively unstable. If one were to care about the health of Hollywood big business, it all seems very scary.

But we don't or, at least, we shouldn't. We aren't making any money from it. The question for me is: would it be great if the model collapsed or not? What if the parent corporations (who could swallow a quarter billion loss if they wanted to) demanded budget caps? Or if a tipping point occurred when everyone just gave up going to the cinema (perhaps when hi def cinema systems become affordable to mortals).

What would we lose? What would we gain? Purely for the spectacle of a pile up, what would happen if a rapidly changing market forced a huge change in the, supposedly, market led Hollywood business? Just for a change (and after sitting through the 3 hour bloats of these recent films), I would really love to see what happens.

Chris Oliver: I'd certainly welcome the end of the Blockbuster Model. Not the end of blockbuster movies, just the end of them being the centerpiece of the industry. But I don't see it happening any time soon. As Andrew points out, they are still making money, even if it is a stupid business plan.

What I do hope for is that, as the cost of filming on digital becomes lower and lower, we'll see a more and more diverse and vital field of independent film. I know this sort of rosey prediction of the future gets tiresome, but I'm an optimistic guy. I can see a very near future where making a movie will be not much more daunting than writing a book or starting a band, and the filmmaker can self-market it through a network of like-minded enthusiasts. Meanwhile, the studios can continue making their exploding robot movies (and releasing vaguely intersting pseudo-indies through their "independent film" subsidiaries).

Andrew Clarke: The explosion of online networks - from MySpace to YouTube to whatever the fuck kids are using these days - proves that there is a genuine desire for this style of content delivery. There's no studio pushing these places - they simply wouldn't exist if the people didn't spend loads of time on them. It's organic, it's real, and it's independent of the old power structures. The question is what sort of things will come from it. As these networks are so self-selecting, would movies made that way not be opaquely specific and insular - not meaning anything to those not in on the culture or 'joke'? Will we finally get our first emo-auteur?

Movies won't go back to the way they were pre-77. If the movie becomes truly democratised, what will happen to the medium?

George Merchan: Like Chris, I'd love to see digital filmmaking become more prevalent. Because of its cheaper/easier to use nature, though, you're gonna get tons of shit (this is similar to the internet and Web 2.0, blogs - not us of course! - etc.) But, it's like if you threw a hundred darts at a board, one or two are bound to hit the bullseye. Digital will unearth new and exciting things at the end of the day. And for film nerds and cineastes, that's fucking exciting.

But I don't think you can talk about digital (or even plain film) without talking about the piracy issue. Practically everything gets digitized now (both professionally and otherwise), and what with the move towards digital exhibition, the amount of "leakage" is probably only going to get worse. Will that ultimately change the method of how we get our cinema? It's morphing the music biz still as we speak. Granted, the experience of listening to music is obviously not the same as watching a film, but I still think the demand is there to have these other avenues of distribution. Look at YouTube and MySpace like Andrew mentions. So far the movie industry is trying its hardest to clamp down on piracy, but I think they're just fighting evolution at this point. Or is it devolution? Nah, probably not. In 50 years time, we'll probably still have the ArcLights and Alamo Drafthouses and... oh... wait...

Doug Slack: Digital filmmaking could lead to more specialized YouTube sights. Sites designed specifically to host movies. This will create a gatekeeper and an online studio system. If an online studio can accumulate enough quality films they could afford to charge a subscription rate. Or a pay-per-view system.

The dawn of a new age of film exhibition will be upon us as soon as someone figures out just how to make money off this shit.

Andrew Clarke: I guess we can look at the music industry, who faced their piracy problems with the same belligerence at first, to see how Hollywood is going to do over the next few years, and at the cable tv market to see how a fractured, more democratised movie market would function. We'd get HBO and a thousand channels of shit.

I guess it would have been fun if the very idea of 'quality' changed. If two hour spectacle movies simply stopped being made because everyone downloaded 10minute clips to play on their 3 inch iPhone screen. A nice, radical idea, but unlikely.

Any collapse, judging by other industries would lead to consolidation of the majors (leading to even safer, homogenised product) and extreme specialisation by everyone else. As always, some good will trickle through the gaps.

Here's a thing though - I certainly make noises in favour of radical change, but do we, as genre loving geek types (I mean, I'm just assuming here), actually have it really good right now? Imagine living 50 years ago when genre films were made for pennies and mostly by morons while Hollywood concentrated on musicals. Now it's Sci-Fi and fantasy. We'll complain about them not getting some character 'right', or being too 'safe' or 'dumb', but studios are still putting the resources into making these expensive properties properly.

Isn't it us geeks that are winning out here, with our Spider-Mans and Lord Of The Rings?

Doug Slack: Geeks love blockbusters more than they'll admit. Hell, I love 'em as much as I love their predecessors, the drive-in and grindhouse movies. I wouldn't be surprised to see all low budget and indie fare driven to the Internet or DVD, while the movie theaters show nothing but blockbuster spectacles. When you think about it, they fit their respective formats well.

Whatever happens with home entertainment, the movie theaters will always be open. People just enjoy going out, plain and simple. They like to do something on a Saturday night and be part of the community. Human nature will keep the theaters in business indefinitely.

Chris Oliver: To continue on the point of digital moviemaking, the actual "making movies" part is going to be much easier, but distribution is still going to be hard. The "specialized YouTube sites" idea sounds about right, or at least like a good start. I guess the question becomes, when you start making actual movies, and not 5-minute or 30-second skits, will people sit on the computer and watch them? Or will it be easier to just sell DVD's through mail-order? (Certainly that would be the easier way to turn a profit on it.) Or by that time, will everyone just have their computers integrated into their home theaters, so that watching something on the web is almost indistinguishable from watching a DVD? That's the part that I can't quite figure out.

Charlie Brigden: I don't think any kind of digital revolution will kick off until the scene radically changes. Right now, YouTube and its ilk are fantastic channels for distribution in theory, but in practice they're distractions that people use in their lunch hour at work to watch funny videos of cats. Currently, at least in the mainstream, I'm not sure they're much more than a glorified version of Candid Camera, neverending in a burning maelstrom of home videoed hell.

And while that isn't everyone, I think it is a large amount of people who would rather watch the current digital comedy zeitgeist as opposed to a creative and thought provoking piece of art. You can throw out a hundred fresh short films, but people will always latch on to Tay Zonday, and send that to all their friends instead. Again, I think it goes back to the mainstream (and the "underground" in some cases) where it's all very casual. Case in point, my shorts that I've thrown online. I've asked a lot of my friends to watch them, and I got very little feedback other than 's'alright,' whereas if I'd posted a picture of a Thundercats clip dubbed with Big Lebowski quotes, I'd be hailed as some sort of comedy wunderkind. Obviously, there's a little bitterness on my part, and I'm not painting my own work as some kind of Kubrickesque brilliance, but the general apathy to anything that requires an actual attention span and a little brain engagement seems to tell me that there's huge promise, but there needs to be huge change before this is accepted as a real viable alternative to something like cinema, or even public access TV.

George Merchan: I agree that theaters will always be around, but they're probably going to become much more elite so as to offer something besides a really big screen, great sound, and annoying people. Cost will reflect this too, unfortunately, but it'll be worth it. Again, the ArcLight model... it's got a fucking bar in the lobby, people! I can't stress how simple and brilliant that is.

But Doug's idea of keeping the big dicks in the theaters and the choads on DVD is a great one, I think. One that we will probably move towards actually. One I'm hoping we move towards as someone who wants to make his own shit and get all the help he can get. Charlie knows my plight. The business simply needs to embrace that because there is a market for it.

Of course, there is the argument that optical media like DVDs are gonna eventually go the way of the Dodo and everything will be delivered to us on giant fucking servers. Imagine every home with a large hard drive that's directly hooked up to the internet and acts as a hub for delivery of digital content. On it you keep your films, your TV shows, your music, your family photos, your porn. Those 3000 DVDs you don't know where to store? Now a bunch of unseen, out of the way files on your shiny new entertainment unit. Sounds like how we're already converging with our computers and Xboxes/Playstations. Also Tivo.

As for the YouTubes, MySpaces, and Revvers (an amalgam of YouTube and Google AdSense... wave of the future?) of the world, they really are like the Nickelodeons of the day, except that instead of getting anything new out of it, we're getting regurgitation. Something will come along eventually that'll completely change the perception of what one can do with this. But right now is not it, like Charlie says. Culturally, it's a child's sandbox. The moment someone builds the "No Homers" treehouse that everyone wants in on is when the paradigm will start shifting.

All that said, "Tourette's Guy" on YouTube is hilarious.

"Fuck salt!"

Doug Slack: Tourette's Guy should get a three picture movie deal.

George, like you said, theaters are looking for other ways to entice audiences. Here is where you need to understand the business model of a theater to guess where it's going. A theater makes very little money from ticket sales. Barely enough to cover overhead, usually. They turn their profit from concessions. Basically, a theater is in business to sell popcorn and soda, not to show movies. The movies are merely the means to get people to the candy stand. This is why theaters LOVE kids' movies and blockbusters and it's another reason why we might see indie fare leave the moviehouses.

The bar is a good idea, but probably won't play with the national chains...yet. It costs a lot to get a liquor license. Not to mention the fact that they're in for a world of headaches if they show anything without an R rating. Soccer moms won't feel safe sending their kids off to a theater with a bar and the theaters will have to use a lot of resources to monitor bar sales and keep the booze out of the minors hands. This strikes me as unrealistic since so many chains can't be bothered now to monitor the houses for noise.

Which leads me to the biggest change exhibitors need to make if they're going to survive. Talkers. Crying babies. Cell phones. Blow jobs. I spent many years as a theater manger for three different companies and I can tell you the reason these problems still persist is money. Exhibitors are notoriously cheap when it comes to payroll. Floor staff make minimum wage, managers are expected to work extra hours every week for no additional salary, staff will be sent home if business is slow. To properly monitor audiences and enforce rules of behavior, you need to add more ushers and so far the chains aren't interested in spending those extra dollars. Then there's the basic policy chains have of never turning away business. They'll sell a ticket to a couple with a baby at 10:00pm just to bring in all the cash they can. If theaters aren't discretionary enough to refuse certain sales, they may very well get hurt in the long run. But they're not ready to take that financial hit just yet.

George Merchan: I knew about the concession stand being the real source of loot for theaters, but that's still really interesting about the attitude exhibitors have in general towards their business. I'm just wondering that what with prices continually getting higher and the pre-roll of ads and what not getting longer, at what point will it be "too much" for audiences? Or am I giving audiences too much credit? Will they not give a fuck and fork over the green anyway?

Chris Oliver: I've always thought that there must be a ceiling--maybe around $10. That if tickets got to be $11, people would just say "fuck it" and watch a DVD. But now that the $11 ticket is almost here, it doesn't look like people are gonna stop. I figure we'll end up with a two-tier system. In rich neighborhoods, it'll be the ArcLight model. In poor neighborhoods, it'll be cheap tickets and lots of ads to see a double feature of worn-out prints of second-run movies, but the air conditioning will always be working. Which leaves the middle squeezed out.

Doug Slack: I'm gonna say it will be split. Most casual moviegoers will continue to suck it up until there's an actual gang rape during the show. And all the rapists' cell phones go off at once. And they're smoking. Crack.

But the indie/art house fags like us will jump ship and watch our Catherine Keener films at home.

George Merchan: Amen, brotha.

Andrew Clarke: So is there any chance this 3-D malarkey Cameron and Zemeckis are touting will be the saviour of the cinema?

Everyone who hasn't seen it in action thinks it is duff. Everyone who has says it's great. People said you can only use that super wide screen format (insert name of super wide screen format) for snakes and funerals, but now it is a valid artistic choice. Then again, it's easier to pull the curtains a bit further back than it is to get everyone to wear goggles.

And what of this mocap stuff Zemeckis is using for Beowulf. He says it gives the director unprecedented freedom and that you can film absolutely anything for $1m a minute, so solving the inflationary budget problem. Everyone who's seen that says it looks like Final Fantasy. Which was crap.

The changes suggested so far are more social, like making cinemas more classy, or getting people to stop watching videos of cats (never, ever going to happen). Are those pushing for a technological solution full of shit?

Doug Slack: Yes. Because cinema doesn't need a savior. It's doing just fine on the technical front. Receipts are up.

Most of the complaints I read about going to the movies revolve around cost and rude audiences. Nobody, outside of a handful of geeks, laments to the overuse of CGI.

George Merchan: About that fancy new tech: if a 3D shot can somehow convey something either narratively or character-wise that 2D cannot (and I mean something beyond immersion), then bully. Bring that shit. In the hands of a James Cameron, I'm not terribly optimistic. Peter Jackson though, we'll see. As for mo cap... there's the terrible possibility of fapping to a CG render of Angelina Jolie. That's only a few steps removed from jerkin' it to Hentai, right?

Charlie Brigden: I think ticket prices and the snack prices are doing a lot to make people not go to the theater. I mean, just looking at a couple of weeks ago when we saw Transformers, the tickets cost $12 each, along with a hot dog, popcorn and a drink, which came to about $16. Fair enough, I didn't care that much before I enjoyed the film a hell of a lot, but when the theaters are pouring out shit and folks are still paying those prices, there has to be a breaking point somewhere.

I mean, one of our favourite nights out is dinner and a movie, and I know that goes for a lot of people. That used to be a good, cheap night out. Now you're looking at $57 a head if you find a cheap restaurant. So you pay $57, and see a movie that cost $300m to make but is absolute pants, you start to get a little bitter about things. Of course, you don't have to buy popcorn, that's just me. But even $12 to see a flick is expensive. Especially since you can pay around double that and buy the DVD and watch it in an environment with less mouthbreathers.

And that's probably the big thing for me, personally (and the wife). While we like to catch up with cinema as much as possible, and we always try and go and see the "big" films (not just blockbusters, but the stuff we just cannot miss) we're perfectly happy enough to just wait for DVD. We have our front room with a good surround kit and a big HDTV, and we don't spend the whole film having the back of our seats being kicked by some retard child who's been thrown in the theater while his mom goes out to buy more wifebeaters, which happened at The Simpsons Movie.

Obviously, this is me being a snagglepuss in general, but I just get so fucking annoyed at theaters now because people just go there to fuck about, and I like to be able to watch a film on a big screen without a child screaming every five minutes. Like when I went to see X-Men 3, and this weekend dad took his five children, one of which was in a pushchair, and who continually threw her toys out of the pram and then cried because of it. Because superdad was too busy watching Brett Ratner's masterpiece, she kept crying and it ended up being my wife who got up and gave the kid the toy back.

Fuck that. I'd rather wait, rent/buy the DVD and watch it at home.

Andrew Clarke: You do have to remember that we are all rapidly leaving the target demographic for these movies. While I sympathise with you Charlie, you are being a big grump. You are after control of your environment, comfort and no stupid people, and so you move away from multiplexes. Remember all those godawful pubs and clubs you went to as a kid? I do, and now I'd rather some friends round for dinner.

We put a sheet up on the side of our house last weekend and watched Jaws after the sun went down. This was the best cinema experience I've had in years.

The thrill of simply 'going to the cinema' is gone from us not, perhaps, because cinemas have gotten worse, but because we've just been so many times. This is normal, and not a sign of the death of cinema, only a changing of the generational guard. One day, we all turn into our dads.

P.S. In London, tickets can be the equivalent of $20 - $25.

George Merchan: Jesus. What's an average Friday night at a pub cost?

What about "Day-and-Date" releases where you get the movie in theaters, on DVD, and OnDemand on the same day? Soderbergh tried it with Bubble. Though that one was obviously doomed to fail anyway, could it work for a big film that audiences actually want to see?

I think it's pretty clear that nothing is actually going to die within our lifetime or that of even our children's, but I do think we're headed towards a new evolution of exhibition defined primarily by choice. So what are the most viable possibilities? And more importantly, will they help promote good filmmaking?

Andrew Clarke: You start saying things like 'our children's lifetime' and I start thinking of peak-oil, environmental collapse and ending my days in a bubble with one faint TV channel being piped in telling me over and over that 'the war is going well, the war is going well'. I got totally taken out of Duel recently because I kept thinking about all that pollution the truck was pumping out.

The novel hasn't really died, though many, possibly grumpy, people said it reached it's peak in the 19th Century, so there's no reason to think feature length movies will die out, either.

While digital could lead to more independent and interesting movies being made, it will make it more difficult to sift through the crap. The only prediction I can give is that I will watch Transformers 3: Cubed.

And thus passed three days with nary a stirring...

George Merchan: Are we finished with this? Any last thoughts?

Doug Slack: I've given my thoughts and don't see any other questions I have an answer for. Unless anyone else has another question to raise, I'm done.

Andrew Clarke: Will you go see Transformers 3 with me?

Doug Slack: Only if you keep your sleek gay robot theories to yourself.