The Economics of 3D Movies

I thought the main solution to piracy being persued was embedding the adverts in the programme/movie. Yesterday I switched over to ITV and thought there was an extended advert for Sony on, only later did I realise they had been showing Casino Royale.

There will be a small slice of the market for 3d, but it’s not going to make much of a dent. All the money spent on 3D – it’s definitely not cheap – could be used for much more interesting purposes.

I’m with Kristin Thompson et al on this.

I’d go to a theater more often if the soundtrack were played live, or if the food wasn’t so fraking awful, but not so much for 3D (which I can’t see because of my astigmatism) or for the privilege of paying $6 for a bucket of popcorn, so I can watch teenagers text each other during the movie. If the theater-going experience were scaled up a bit, making it more like going to the theater to see a play or opera, then I could see that as a cultural benefit. But that would exclusivize the whole industry, which wouldn’t be good for the economics. As I understand it, theaters already have a hard enough time getting buts in seats, possibly due to the aforementioned cost of popcorn, or because we’re also treated like criminal suspects, lectured at our apparent intent to pirate the movie we’ve already paid money to see.

I’m skeptical of this newfangled “technicolor” thing. Sure, there are some great color films out there, but I haven’t seen one of them that isn’t pretty much just as enjoyable when viewed on a good old black-and-white television set. A truly color movie would look a lot like a colorblindness test, but I won’t hold my breath.

I have to agree with Henry here, if I understand correctly, that 3-D movies may be able to survive on their “aura”. But if so then they’ll need to provide a bit more than the warm glow of “it’s 3-D!” You know, like having a plot and adult characters instead of appealing to 14 year old boys and children.

I’ve seen a few movies in 3d, but not Up. However, it did look to me like it had the potential to make much more interesting use of 3d than the ones I did see (Beowulf and Sea Monsters 3-D) made. Although perhaps Beowulf was a test to see how much of a difference 3d made in consumer preferences for images of a basically naked CG version of Angelina Jolie.

Making 3D computer screens is apparently not immensely difficult. And as Chris already notes, computer games offer a public willing to pay for for 3D that might be much larger than the public willing to pay for 3D movies.

There was the same phenomenon with HDTV, where tv manufacturers and TV suppliers where locked in a chicken and egg dance that was broken by video games.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if 3D came to homes before it makes it big in cinema.

Gmoke got it.

Actually, there is at least one Philips 3D set so awfully engineered that you don´t need a special gogle to experience the effect.

Realistically, unless we are willing to shell out the same amount of money for a movie as we are for a ballet or play, we’re probably not a market that’s worth a whole heck of a lot.

When I lived in NY City I bought $15 tickets to the Metropolitan Opera 3 or 4 times. The movies there cost $12 or so, and given that I usually buy a snack the price is close to the same. The Met tickets were not wonderful for sight, but not bad, and the sound was still very nice. (It would be better if the leg room wasn’t designed for someone about 5’6″ at most, but still.) Interestingly enough, the Met now offers HD showings of operas at various NYC movie theaters, but though I’d certainly be more comfortable at one, I don’t think I’m likely to go.

flubber wrote: “I would think vertigo or motion sickness would be an issue. But maybe that’s not as common a problem as I think…”

No, it is a big problem. It’s not vertigo, but the mismatch between the muscles that focus your lens and the ones that move your eyes. Slate had a nice explanation of the problem, which is inherent to any 3D where the image is actually on a flat screen. That means all the current technologies, and pretty much anything else until holograms are working.

Speaking as a professional musician, this aura argument has a lot to recommend it. However, I have to admit it might be a case of hoping it’s true… playing’s more fun than recording anyway (at least from my point of view). Yeah, I’ll just tell myself that until I start to feel better. ;)

I’ve long been convinced that the future path for musicians is to use recordings distributed over the Internet for free to put butts in seats. That’s because a recording is cheaply reproduced, but the show isn’t. Of course, that means that it has to be a show, but since when is that a new idea in music? I never play a song exactly the same way twice anyway (at least, not when I’m playing it at a bar… when recording it’s a different story), so do things to make it interesting and unique, so that people who like the kind of thing that I do want to come to the show to experience that niqueness.

Oh, and push as much merch as you can. You might split the gate, but the t-shirts are all yours.

In the movie industry, I’d recommend that movie theatres consider going to IMAX across the board, and that Hollywood start making movies with that as the base format. That is an experience that cannot be easily replicated at home except by very wealthy people… and as pointed out earlier, it’s hard to pirate being in a movie theatre.

Another unique part of the movie experience is the communal nature of it, which is quite different from both television and the Internet. Making it easy for the audience to interact both before and after the movie (in a lounge, say) would both enhance the experience for the customer, making it more likely that they return, and give an opportunity to sell them things to the movie owner. Cinemas Guzzo in Montreal is an example of this kind of thinking, but it’s more ‘family’ oriented… think Chuck E. Cheese with a movie theatre. Bowling lanes, also. However, having a couple of rooms able to hold a couple of hundred people each, being able to sell them food (and decent food… it’s not like it’s impossible to make money selling decent food) and booze (adult lounge, youth lounge… that idea is as old as the hills in the bar business) and allowing people to talk about the movies they just saw will greatly enhance the audience’s appreciation of the experience as a whole… which can bring them back. Basically, build communities around the theatre by making it fun and interesting for people to see movies and meet the other people that see movies.

It would change movie making to an incredible degree (as I understand, making a 25 y.o. 16 with makeup is pretty much impossible when filming in IMAX; you see a 25 year old actor with a bad makeup job, not a 16 year old). I gotta ask, though, would that necessarily be a bad thing?

I think movie theatres will survive (and can even prosper), if they provide an experience that’s not replicable at home, and use the group nature of seeing movies in a theatre to their advantage by enhancing the overall communal experience as well as keeping ’em around to extract more money from them.

Yeah, hooch… that’ll save ’em.

a truly 3D movie would be one where the 3D was so integral to the storytelling and the visuals and the experience that seeing it in 2D would be like seeing a giant-robots-throwing-buildings-at-each-other blockbuster as a flipbook while a hyperactive eight-year-old supplied the sound effects by shouting “BANG!” and “CRASH!” in your ear. Such a film would be expensive to produce and market and could never hope to recoup.

Who knew Cory Doctorow was such a Greenbergian formalist?

(Did you know that (a) colour is an important part of most paintings, and (b) you can make money selling black-and-white engravings of paintings, if you exist in the right time period?)

In the movie industry, I’d recommend that movie theatres consider going to IMAX across the board, and that Hollywood start making movies with that as the base format.

You don’t seem to be aware what a cumbersome and incredibly expensive process filming in the IMAX format is and the same goes for distribution and projection. Essentially the consequence of your suggestion would be that films could only be made by big studios with deep pockets. Also, the vast majority of productions are simply not suited to the IMAX workflow.

In the age of increasing democratization through digital technology (you can get a RED camera, which shoots at 4K, with lenses for around $25.000 and set up a more or less professional editing and color grading suite for an additional $10.000), relying on expensive gimmicks and focussing “user experience” instead of content would be exactly the wrong signal to send.

The whole problem could easily be solved, if people respected respected creative work as they used to and stopped pirating films.

What’s the problem?

Seems to me the problem is quite clear:

The problem with the movie home viewing market is that there is a substitute that is relatively good, and cheap-to-free – pirated movies via your BitTorrent service of choice. (…) I would be thinking very, very seriously about ways to differentiate my product and move into a more secure market where individuals were less likely to be able to upload free competitors to my product and hence cut my margin to ribbons.

But you do take it for granted that when someone says “The problem”, it means “The problem that I should be concerned with”.

I don’t take it for granted that an industry maintaining a market it’s always had is the same thing as a problem I should be concerned with.(…) Is there some larger problem afoot?

Yes, because we are not talking about toilet paper, but about the future of an art form and a pretty amazing one at that. Now, of course one could say that, say, all these guys:

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/index.html

should make (or have made) films in IMAX 3D format or whatever, and otherwise sod them, who cares – but that seems rather callous and ignorant. Of course if you don’t care all that much about film, you don’t care, and there’s not much that can be done about that. But a lot of people do, without even taking into account those involved in the production, distribution and marketing of film, whose livelihood depends on it.

Films will always be made under whatever economic circumstances – so no, film as an art form will not vanish. But that in itself does not mean that piracy doesn’t have a very tangible effect on the film industry and the people involved with it – if some restaurant customers consistently refused to pay for their meals, just because they somehow could, there would still be restaurants, but they would have a harder time staying in business.

I dispute the “as they used to” as facts not in evidence.

Well, I can’t look into people’s hearts. Maybe they really wanted to distribute the album they bought to hundreds of thousands of people for free. They couldn’t. Maybe, if shoplifting, fare dodging or tax evasion could be done with minimal risk of getting caught, people would do that as well. They can’t.