Discussion: The Future of Cinema and "MovieGoing"

Over the past few years, we witnessed “Home entertainment” get bigger and bigger.
Big brands offer affordable systems for every household, promising to transform every living room into a private movie theater.
Then “entertainment on the go” was re-established with the iPod and iTunes, which now offers downloadable movies.
It started with the humble VHS and now you can basically watch your favorite movies in decent quality (in most cases better than VHS) on almost every device you handle in your everyday life.
Director George Lucas recently said that other than indy4, he is not making films anymore. “Everything is going to be TV or Downloadable anyway” he added.
Peter Jackson said that he wants to venture into different ways of storytelling, like video games and that he is “Bored of movies”.
As a film fun, this upsets me. It seems that cinema as we know it is dying.
Sure, naturalists will still keep going into the theater to watch a movie, but that’s a very small pie of a market that feeds the system that creates films.

What is your opinion? Where do you think Cinema is heading?

i'm bored with movies, too. my m.a. degree was in film studies, and i wouldn't mind the death of cinema.

Eddie,

So from now on when I respond to something you say about film with "That's because you just don't like movies" you won't argue with me anymore?

i was being facetious.

people wring their hands all the time over this or that issue. for example, i'm sure that classical-music lovers began bemoaning the death of classical music since the 1850s, but guess what? today, classical music is still performed widely, and new classical music is being created (even paul mccartney, a rocker, is writing classical music).

it's possible that movies in cinemas will follow the trends established by other performing arts--cater to an audience willing to pay $40 and up. this is actually good news because it makes moviegoing too prohibitive for people to take their ten under-15 kids, which means that patrons can enjoy movies in relative peace and quiet. plus, the floors won't be littered with candy as well as spilled popcorn and drinks.

by the way, the site's stupid programming code masked part of my previous post. i wanted to write "under dash fifteen", but the site showed my words as "under ".

(n)

There are several ways to approach this...for one a movie rental is cheaper than going to the movies,specially if you include your family.
There are movies that are always worth the price of admission to rush out and see but they are few and far between.
Thanks to better technology (and a bit of cash)you can have a pretty good movie experience at home...which of course only gets better with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray coming into it.
There will always be cinema,it just need to be fresh and new again (kind of like the first time you saw it in IMAX)because you have to give people a reason to want to go...
Specially since it can be a expensive and a lot of movies are just plain badly written or even worse they are old ones being re-made by lazy studios trying to cash in.

Unfortunately, I think Eddie is right. Aside from a handful of major corporate releases, cinema is rapidly becoming a niche product, like opera. And like opera, it can really only be supported in a handful of cities with very large, clustered populations.

As for the cinema-going experience, it's clear that most people just don't see or don't care about the difference between seeing a film on FILM as opposed to an alternate, bastardized format. I don't see any reason to expect that to change either.

It's not just reactionary nostalgia to find that thought a little sad. There is no substitute for seeing a film, one shot on film, in the theater. No matter how big your screen is, or how wicked your speakers are. It still isn't film, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Good topic. And unfortunatly, yeah, it seems that "The Cinema" is in fact dying. Its death is from a double-edged sword: advancements in technology that make movie viewing at home more than just watching the tube and the rising budgets and costs of producing a movie. Movies just don't make as much in the theater today as they did before, and everyone knows it. We're bombarded with 90% of recycled stories throw at the cineplexes, while usually an average episode of "24" has most films beat entertainment wise.

When I was in film school, maybe ten years ago, digital filmmaking and projection was just getting started. It was more of an idea than a reality. Everyone I knew, including myself, hated and loathed the idea that one day film would be gone - except for one guy, who could clearly see that yes, one day it would all be digital. At the time, I thought he was an idiot. A few years ago, I decided this guy had better vision than the rest of us. First and foremost, it would (eventually) be cheaper than film. Add to the mix that a digital picture will never fade, you can do whatever you want to it, etc., and it's hard to argue for film anymore.

Someday soon the Dream State we experience while in a movie theater will be gone for good. While I myself used to think this was a bad thing, I no longer do. Ten years ago, there were tons of "films" I was running to the theater to see. Lately, I can't think of one single movie I felt the need to plop down ten bucks for - it's just not worth it.

Like Lucas has said time and again, one day cinema will be more like an event similar to the opera or a sporting event - and for this, it will have to change to formats like IMAX or 3-D. They'll need to offer us something more in a theater than the simple fact that it's being projected on film, (which eventually it won't be, anyway), or it will need to be a film bigger than anything - like a Star Wars or an Indy. I'd run out right now to see any of those in a theater I'll be first in line should Indy 4 ever get off the ground. Other than that, I think I can wait for home video for just about everything else. I certainly don't need to see Fantastic Four 2 projected onto a big screen.

Come to think of it, I might not need to see it projected on a small screen, either. :)

One can argue that movies themselves are getting worse than ever, but we tend to forget that in the golden age of movies, the 1930s and 40s, there were just as many dogs as there are today, maybe more. They've just gotten lost and forgotten.

As far as digital shooting is concerned, it might be more convenient, but it still has a ways to go, even at the new 2K standard, to catch up with the reality of conventional photographic film. The new "Superman Returns," shot with an improved Panasonic Genesis camera, looks sharp but remains glossy and flat.

As far as people going out to see movies is concerned, of course, there are many other competing alternatives we have from home theater and computers. But remember that there are also as many movie screens as ever (counting all the screens in our modern multiplexes), they shows a bigger variety of films than ever, and they continue to thrive, despite the exaggerated concerns of the movie industry. Compared to the heyday of films in the 30s and 40s, the availability of foreign and independent films in America is bigger than ever before.

Most important, people will still go out to the movies for the same reason they will continue to go out to dinner: for the experience. Yes, it's easier to eat at home (especially with frozen meals), just as it's easier to pop in a DVD, but going out for a good meal at a restaurant not only saves the fuss and bother of cooking, serving, and cleaning up, it provides food one can't always get at home, and it provides the experience of getting out of the house. Same thing with movies. We'll probably never have actual movie-theater screens in our homes, so nothing is going to compare with that big-screen experience and big-auditorium sound.

The motion-picture theater and the motion picture itself haven't died just yet.

John

What John said.

Lacking a sense of history, people tend to forget that 90% of cinematic output has *always* been garbage, from the silent era onward. We are not experiencing some uniquely awful nadir of the medium. And no matter how convenient home or on-the-go viewing gets, the simple fact is that people just don't LIKE staying at home all the time, and actually look pretty hard for an excuse to get out on friday nights and do something with a group that'll put the week behind them.

Lucas up there in his Xanadu, is about as far removed from on-the-street reality as he can be. People aren't just going to see $200mil event films small budget comedies (Borat anyone?) and concept pictures still succeed in drawing huge crowds, and home theater can get as big as it wants. The same grownup moviegoers who aren't shelling out their money to see Adam Sandler light his farts will continue to support good movies, teenagers who don't know any better will still need someplace to go on friday nights, and enough good films will always manage to break out and find an audience.

And the dysfunctional cycle continues. Theaters ain't goin anywhere.