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Nobel Son, a kidnapping comedy starring Alan Rickman as a Nobel laureate, was first seen at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2007. Critics at the time weren’t much impressed, but the movie’s quality is beside the point. The fact that a fairly major motion picture (the cast list also features Eliza Dushku, Danny De Vito and Mary Steenburgen) can get its first UK release as a newspaper freebie just goes to show how quickly the movie distribution business is changing.
Right now, there are scores of ways to see recent films without ever setting foot in a cinema or a DVD store. Companies like Lovefilm will post films direct to their customers. Netflix, which runs on a similar business model, also offers streaming movies direct to your TV. Apple will let you download movies and TV shows to play on your iPod on the way to work, and a number of games consoles offer downloaded movies from your broadband line.
PC users can choose between dozens of sites offering free and public domain feature films for download. You can even find forgotten B movies like Attack of the Giant Leeches and Teenagers From Outer Space. The Luc Besson-produced environmental documentary Home had its premiere, not in a glitzy Los Angeles multiplex, but on YouTube. Director Sally Potter went a step further and opened her fashion industry movie Rage on mobile phones.
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And these, of course, are just the legal options. Movie piracy, once the province of the sneaky camcorder and the dodgy market stall video, is now a massive presence on the internet. If you step back and look at the bigger picture, there is a clear parallel between what is happening to the movie business right now and what happened to the music business ten years ago. Digital and alternative methods of distribution are taking over from the traditional movie viewing experience, and distributors face their biggest challenge since the home video boom of the 1980s.
Purists will argue that watching the latest Bruce Willis blockbuster from the privacy of your laptop cannot compare with the experience of going out to the movies, but what exactly are we giving up? Half an hour of commercials? The privilege of paying £5 for a bucket of stale popcorn? Struggling to hear the dialogue over that kid with the mobile phone in the front row? With digital projection and surround sound more affordable than ever before, the home movie experience is not only vastly cheaper than a night at the multiplex, it’s arguably more fun.
It remains to be seen how Hollywood will respond to this challenge in the long term, but for now, the movie business is falling back on spectacle to pull in the punters. Warner Bros in particular has embraced IMAX, most successfully in the gigantic action sequences of The Dark Knight. Meanwhile, millions have been invested in improving 3D technology, and its biggest test to date will come when James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster Avatar hits cinemas in December. But will that be enough to get movie lovers back to the cinema? Eventually, the big studios may have to embrace the future and release their brand new blockbusters online. We’ll all be attending the premiere from our living rooms. Hey, maybe new sci-fi flick Surrogates isn’t so far off the mark after all…
