DVDs, Home Theatres and the death of quality in Hollywood

We are our own worst enemies at times

Was just reading and conversing a bit at another site I frequent. A discussion there revolved around the film Serenity (recently released, great SciFi / Action / Adventure film, well worth the price of admission for *anyone*) and the news found here: http://www.thefutoncritic.com/cgi/newswire.cgi?id=7009 which notes the following (and more):

FIREFLY (FOX) - USA has purchased the broadcast rights to "Serenity," the feature film continuation of FOX's short-lived series "Firefly," from NBC Universal Domestic Television. The deal, valued in the $3 million range, will give the cable channel the non-exclusive rights to broadcast the film beginning in May of 2008, when HBO's initial window expires. Not surprisingly, USA has the option to air "Serenity" on cable sibling Sci Fi, the current home to "Firefly's" off-network run.

That news solicited the following reply from one of the people participating in the conversation:

I MAY see it on the bigscreen, but, with a great home theater setup, and the price of tickets at or exceeding $10, I may just wait for the DVD instead. I think many are thinking the same as I.

I left some of the following as my reply:

In case you haven't heard, there are these things called "matinees" where prices are much less.

And btw, if you want to hope to ever see additional installments of adventures in the Firefly/Serenity 'verse, then the box office is important, and just getting the DVD isn't that much help.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the movie deserves to be seen on the big-screen. It is that good, and worth every penny of the full fare, never mind discounted fare you might catch by seeing an early movie on a weekend versus going to the full priced evening and late nite shows.

And I'd also say again it's worth getting the biggest bucket of popcorn for. It's got great action, good characters, great dialog, humor in just the right spots, and keeps you in your seat well entertained. It beat the crap outta any of the 3 Star Wars "pre-quels" and beats the crap outta the last several Star Trek flicks.

Even most main stream reviewers have given the film good marks, which is great for Joss Whedon. Sadly those reviewers haven't been paying for tickets though, and the people that have read the reviews haven't shown up in droves because many seem to be like the poster I'm quoting above -- waiting for DVDs so they can see stuff on their own personal home theatre, rather than paying high prices to theatres.

I continued a bit with some additional thoughts that I'm gonna expound on further here, hopefully it will be worthy of discussion among others.

Theatres in general are losing business like crazy because of this tectonic shift in the way customers view Hollywood products. Perhaps it's the over-priced popcorn, the long lines for concession stands, the 30+ minutes of advertisements and other crap shown before movies in some theatres, and the high-prices for tickets, but either way people are not going to theatres the way they used to, and the future of content of Hollywood may suffer greatly because of it.

Instead of being able to use somewhat reliable ticket sales numbers to justify future movie budgets, there will be much more guess work in the future, and maybe more "straight to video releases". That could be fine, but it could also lead to complete and total crap being released and good quality films being left un-made because they would be too expensive to make and market.

Hollywood has good reason to be concerned over the future of their products and their market. They are, even now, trying to get a piece of the Ipod Video pie, having seen the news this past week that promises the ability of customers to buy content on a Video Ipod, including (reportedly) hot content like the current TV hit Lost, or Desperate Housewives.

Entertainment Weekly in a fairly current edition talks about how Video killed the radio star and at the same time made almost as many stars -- including making an empire for the MTV networks. Record companies used to give away their products in the name of self promotion, hoping to help drive sales of records and later CDs. They saw that their products were used to make MTV and VH1 and their TV personalities much money in the process. It may have helped sell those records and CDs, but video sales (at least initially) were minimal thanks to high prices for video equipment (VCR's used to be toys of the rich, as DVDs were just a few years ago) and also high prices for video tapes (thanks in part to Hollywood trying to reap large amounts of money for sales of videos and video tapes of their products).

Hollywood hung onto high prices for years, almost until the death of the VCR. They cried over people using VCRs to record their broadcast content, and content that was sent over cable into people's homes. When they finally realized that there was a market for selling their content when it was fairly priced for home consumption, it was too late to rake in a lot of lost profits. Their reduced pricing which originally came partly from experimenting with prices hoping to perhaps draw in just a few more sales showed that a market existed, but only if prices were in the right range.

Over time Hollywood has found customers for their older content, releasing even old (classic) TV shows on DVD. A format that would seem to be perfect for Hollywood, given that it's fairly high quality, but is recorded on a write protected and copy protected media. The only problem was that the copy protections were broken thanks to industrious hackers that really only ever wanted the ability to play the discs on other operating systems that didn't have players because Hollywood didn't see a market there, and perhaps didn't want to piss off their technology partners like Microsoft and Apple. Now the protections are mere nuisances for those that want to make copies of the discs, and that in turn may have helped to force down pricing even more as Hollywood has struggled to keep prices at a level that make the value of the time involved in copying a disc seem more valuable than the actual cost of a new release.

Along the way consumer electronics firms have helped to provide more and better entertainment equipment to us, the home consumers. Though prices have been high in the past, the race to bring more customers to the products has also seen prices dropped to entice customers, and then later competitors also started dumping their products into the market as well, causing a race to drop prices even more to shore up market share.

Now we have very high-tech equipment for home theatres. Large hi-definition televisions, wide screen TVs, progressive scan DVD players, Dolby sound systems, and much more. And we do continue to crave content to watch on the equipment. More content than just live sporting events like the NFL, MLB, the NBA and others. Movies, TV shows and much more.

The problem has become, though, that Hollywood can't quite predict the content we want so well any more. Where it used to be easy for a pay network like HBO to know what were blockbuster films and would please their customers, the numbers of viewers for films in theatres has dropped and continued to drop as more people have stayed home watching content on their hi-tech toys. That would seem fine as Hollywood would seem to be losing viewers in theatres to viewers at home, but at the same time the number of choices in channels over cable and satellite has led to lower and lower viewership for all individual content providers (it may be near the same total amount of viewers, but the depth of viewers for each channel is much lower, consider it a very large and very shallow pool).

Again, these lower numbers hurt Hollywood because there's so much competition for us (the viewers and consumers) that prices have to be kept down everywhere in the hopes of maximizing returns on what little money is spent to produce the content.

I fear that in the next several years the neighborhood megaplex may go much the same way as the old neighborhood drive-in movies. It happened a bit before when the old (smaller screen) megaplexes were consolidated and eventually replaced with the new mega-megaplexes with huge screens, large and luxurious lobbies, stadium seating and more enticements. Unfortunately those enticements haven't kept us, the consumers, coming. We've grown tired of paying money to the theatres who pay the money to spoiled stars in Hollywood, and it leaves less empirical evidence for the content providers over what content we really want in the future.

Will the content we get in the future be lesser quality stuff like the reality TV shows that fill our air-waves now, or will it be more along the lines of some of the shows that have helped Hollywood enjoy a bit of a renaissance (with shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, etc.)? It's up to us to decide, and part of how we decide is via ticket sales at theatres when quality films like Serenity are out in first run.

I'll just say again, go see the movie in the theatres. It's that good. (And save some $$ to get the DVD later also. It will undoubtedly be worth the $$ also).

entertainment

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Good article....whew its long though!! (Like I can talk!

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I don't think theatres are gonna go the way of the drive in. No matter how great a system I have at home. IT is NOT the same as seeing a movie with an audience of strangers on a really big screen.

There are movies I won't go see on a big screen, mostly chick flicks, and movies with no action. The reason is twofold. First, my theatre time is limited so when I go I want to really see something that rocks on the big screen. And two (your gonna hate this one) the non action movies I can see on dvd and they are well the same.

For some reason action movies are so much better when I watch them with an audience. I don't know why.

I don't know where you live, but our multi-plex is always packed and sell out regularly on opening weekends. Every time I go and think, oh this movies been out for three weeks no one will be here, its full.

Serenity was great. Def one to see on big screen.

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Tova7 - I too have to admit to not going to the big screen that frequently. With the numbers of DVDs I have sitting in my cabinet, the pay channels I have streaming down from the satellites to my DirecTV receivers and such, well there's just too many good choices for me and not enough time to catch everything.

If there's a really good movie out, then I may be inspired to see it in the theatres. Doesn't matter too much if it's something like the movie Sideways, or more like Serenity. Just something that is a cut above. I don't want to just hand my money over for stupid stuff like Flightplan, Saw, or a batch of crap that makes no sense.

I readily admit at times this has cost me opportunities to see some pretty good stuff. Even when stuff comes out on DVD I may still pass on it and ignore it for some time. That happened with a flick called Mindhunters (stars the nice blonde star of Cold Case from CBS tv, along with several other names). I finally saw it because of a "coming soon to DVD" advertisement (or a "now available on DVD" advertisement) in another flick I was seeing on DVD. When I watched it I was very pleasantly surprised. It was a good film, nice thrilling who-dunnit type thing.

The mega-plexes may last a while longer, but I really am wondering just how much longer. They are definitely less crowded than they used to be, and they don't seem to be seeing that trend reversing. It could be because most current stuff from Hollywood is crap, or it could be that we just have too many other choices, or (probably) a combo of both. Either way, it's not making things easier to find more non-crap to watch later.

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My lovely wife told me to tell you "never has she been so enthralled reading about mundane things" high praise indeed terp.

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I have heard that movie theaters wouldn't make any money if it weren't for the concession stands, and that's why the prices are so high. Since the amount of commercials before the movie has increased, I suspect that they aren't helping much either. I think that even with piracy, cable, and more affordable home equipment, the high prices would still keep people away.

I really like going to the movies. I like the big comfy seats, stadium style seating, and the freshly popped popcorn dripping with fake butter. I would probably go more often if I had more time; these days I only make time for really big movies. It's the chik flicks that I rent or just buy on dvd.

If for no other reason, I think that movie theatres will be ok as long as there are single people dating. I don't know any women who would be impressed by a man inviting her over to watch a dvd on his big screen tv for a first date.

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40 mile drive to the theatres = about 3 gallons of gas. At today's market price for gas, that's $7.20. $8.00 (I'm guessing here) per ticket times the 5 in our family old enough to take interest in the flick = $40.00. Figure in us SHARING the massive popcorm, jujubees and soda, and the price still hits the $55.00-$60.00 range. Plus, we have to have four free hours to view the movie.

So, lemme get this straight. For approximately the price of satellite programming and high speed internet connection for the month, I can go see ONE movie. Sorry, it ain't worth it!

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I agree that I love to go to the movies. I love good movies and really like a lot of mindless entertainment for two hours even if it is fluff. I don't have a home theater or even a very big TV, I think it maybe 27" or 32" but I think the theater experience isn't the same as watching it at home. I would hate to see the movies go but I think in some ways the movie industry needs to re-think their pricing structure. Where I live it's $5.50 to go to the matinee. That is almost $30 just for my family to walk in the door if we don't get any popcorn.

We love to go the drive-in. It's $13 with the $5 off military discount for my whole family to go and watch two movies. Plus we can bring a cooler and not spend the high $$$ for concessions. The drive-in has to be making money to stay in business and they aren't charging $9 per person so why do the multiplex's have to charge such high ticket prices?

Also movies just go away too fast. I really wanted to go see Corpse Bride tonight. It's already off at our theater in town and I didn't want to drive 30 miles to Fort Worth to see it. And movies come out on DVD so fast. It seems like we were just going to try to see batman begins at the theater and it's already out for rent.

I haven't seen Serenity yet. I never watched the show but I figure since I loved Buffy and Angel I would probably like something else Joss Whedon does.

Another note, I used to work at the concession stand in a movie theater. I guess about seven years ago. They made huge, HUGE profits from the concessions. Popcorn costs next to nothing, same for the fountain drinks. We actually paid more for the containers than we did for the food. I really don't see the movie theaters not making a profit from ticket prices or concessions. Also they most movies are making huge profits in their world wide release. So even if they don't make a ton of money in our US box office most are still making a profit after world wide and DVD release.

And can I just say that maybe Hollywood needs to try to be a little more original. I mean how many remakes of lame TV show movies do we need. I'm not talking about Serenity but Bewitched, Dukes of Hazard? What's next? The Ashley Simpson show - that would definately be horror.

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