I have always preferred to watch films on my own. When I love a film, I am happy with paying the money to watch it in a room filled with strangers but too often I feel oddly exposed by a bad film experience. A feeling I sense more acutely surrounded by others.
In the past, I have looked around in the dark, guessing opinions in an attempt to make the robbery less irksome by generating some kind of support – I will have a conspirator even if I wouldn’t like to walk anywhere outside, in the daylight, with them.
I am sure William Goldman would say we are still in the hands of studios who are more comfortable with marketable entities like talent and formulaic concepts than they are with real creativity. Perhaps it is unsurprising that most of what comes out often fails to grip me.
But it is more than that. Watching a film is a deeply personal experience that studios and cinemas contorted into a mass consumption exercise. This would have surprised the very man who created the medium, Thomas Edison, at the time of his invention.
When he sat down Edison first experienced the synced sound and motion picture on his own. He sat staring at a small screen with rudimentary sound projection. Kinetoscopes (the device that played the motion pictures captured on his Kinetograph) were penny machines in arcades. Individual engagement was Edison’s imagined reality. In his lifetime he saw it become more than that.
In our lifetime, things have changed once more. The popularity and business potential of the invention is without question but it is interesting to consider the recent cultural development of internet downloads with the experience of the Kinetograph in mind, and how much it cost.
Small, personal screens brought the studios full circle. It is common knowledge that modern studios are powered by DVD sales, rather than box office takings. In recent years, many are threatened to their core by illicit downloads that deliver the original experience at a fractional cost; a modern penny.
Goldman wrote in the 80s, arguing that studio heads pandered to stars, bending scripts to preserve their carefully managed public personas. Something similar may happen now as studios try desperately to cling to their business models. A hit in the cinema comes at a high cost (covering the fall out of other projects that flop). DVD sales are driven by these titles – for 1 new film, retailers buy 10 old films. Now, more than ever, they are chasing ‘the smash’ to encourage back catalogue sales.
MGM is in trouble because their catalogue is floundering, failing to bring in the money that is used annually to service the debt that it bears as an independent company (Universal, owned by Viacom, has much more freedom to push it’s production development slate). It can’t create new films. Bond has been put into hiatus and many other projects are leaking key contributors.
Maybe they will be forced to lead the way in creating a viable digital download business model and we can all watch new James Bond instalments until we turn grey, like our dads, on projectors strung from our ceilings.
What we know from our own research is that consumers attach less value to media content as a digital service. But, in our House Special report on VOD we discovered that not everyone expects content to be free – the price that most people are willing to pay for a movie via a digital service is approximately £4.99.
Today, HMV launch their digital service. They will charge 40p for chart songs and £4.99 for albums.
Lets wait and see how the motion picture industry responds…
Daniel
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