In the 21st century, when screens are everywhere and always on, what is it that will make the ones in cinemas unique?
The rebranding in 2009 of some of Greater Union’s and Birch Carroll and Coyle’s sites as ‘Event Cinemas’ was a clear signal about how Australia’s biggest – and one of its longest-established – exhibition chains would position itself in the media mix of the Online Age. AHL managing director David Seargeant says:
When we started to put in digital projection, we knew it was about other things as well - 3D, bigger screens and sound, alternate content … We wanted to say: ‘Cinema has changed. It’s now far more about entertainment as an event, a destination.’ Bigger TV screens have lifted the experience people can get at home, but they want to get out of their homes, to see things in the best possible environment, and in the company of others.113
Cinemas would distinguish themselves as sites for ‘events’: • the event of ‘going out’ …
• the event of being around other people … but in darkness …
• the event of seeing a first release movie, or live or near-live content, that wasn’t available in the home yet or ever …
• the event of watching a screen bigger and more spectacular than the most sophisticated home theatre system …
• the event of service-at-your-seat – with no trips to the fridge or washing up afterwards …
• the event of dinner and a show … all at once …
• the event of a one-off screening with something special added – a star present or Q&A with the director.
Some of these forms of event were novel; others were already well established at some cinemas: ‘We do events, director’s screenings, Q&As,’ says Cinema Nova’s Natalie Miller. ‘Yes they are “events”, but we do them because that’s what the Nova is about.’114
Always the ‘event’ medium, cinema would do this while ‘televisionizing’ itself, increasingly telling its biggest stories by instalment. Big screen narratives would be kept in the public eye not by moving a select number of analogue copies progressively across physical space but by unleashing a regular flow of digital chapters, each released simultaneously and everywhere, advancing the narrative, reaffirming the brand, updating the conversation.
The broad idea was familiar from cinema’s long experience dealing with competition from older ‘new’ media – first TV, then home video, multi- channel TV and DVD. Cinema’s magic would endure: it would be both bigger and more intimate, more public and more private.
For David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, this is ‘movies as a kind of environment, a constant stream’.115
113
Pers comm., 28 May 2013.
For Emily Bull in Mumbrella it’s ‘branded entertainment’: ‘I believe branded content isn’t just one film on its own: it’s a body
114
Pers comm., 3 June 2013. 115
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of work; it’s tiers of continually updated content that transforms the brand into a broadcaster.’116
But the event game is not only being played by cinema. While the most popular cinema has been ‘televisionizing’, television, the quintessential ‘flow’ medium, has been emphasizing itself as a destination for events like live sport, blockbuster drama series, and reality TV programs that dominate the schedules of particular broadcasters for weeks. Sharing with cinema the struggle for attention in a frenetic media landscape, ‘Event Television’ has become one of small screen strategists’ most-repeated catchphrases.
For its recent entry into original production, US online video company Netflix chose a TV-like production, the 13-part political drama House of Cards (a remake of a British show) but released it like a movie – all at once.117
Does this mean ‘cinema’, ‘television’ and everything else are somehow converging in the Online Age?
Yes and no. Yes because of striking similarities in the ideas that are informing their future strategies – ideas about screens, programming, viewing and listening experiences, and the communities that energise and form around them.
CINEMA TELEVISION
Bigger: 3D, Vmax/ExtremeScreen/Titan XC,
IMAX Screens Bigger: widescreen, HD, 3D, home theatre
Smaller: ‘Gold Class’, Gold Lounge, Director’s Suite
Experience
Smaller: second screen, multi-screening – the tablet and the TV
More than the movie –
retail and entertainment precincts Foxtel IQ, VOD, DVD extras More than the shows –
More than the popcorn –
quality food and drink It’s not TV, it’s HBO/Foxtel
Rewards Clubs
Community TV-driven social media: Fango, ZeeBox, #qanda, Facebook
Cinema as flow:
National exhibition networks, international programming
Regular instalments of franchise movies Programming
TV as [controlled] flow: Catch-up TV Online video Cinema as event:
Franchise and one-off movies Festivals
Live events
TV as event: Franchise and one-off programs
Blockbuster drama series Live events
No because cinemas, self-evidently, remain distinct, physical locations.
Householders might install ‘home cinema’ systems and cinemas might sell some tickets to TV-like events or content streams, and they might screen movies in theatres smaller than living rooms, but the line between buying a ticket at a cinema and other ways of experiencing audiovisual content remains fairly bright.
116
Bull, E. (2012) ‘Brands becoming broadcasters: what does quality branded entertainment really look like?’’, Mumbrella, 27 November.
117
Nussbaum, E. (2013) ‘On Television: Shark Week’, The New Yorker, 25 February. NACO’s Michael Hawkins speculates that episodes of high budget blockbuster TV dramas of the ilk of Homeland, Game of Thrones or Newsroom could be released weekly in cinemas: pers comm., 22 May 2013.
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Cinemas have plenty of challenges in the Online Age. Popular cinema’s core audience for the last 40 years – young people – are going out to see movies a little less often. They have other things to do, other things to watch and other ways to watch movies that cost less than cinemas or nothing at all. More spectacular screens need increasingly spectacular movies to show them off. Digital
technology helps reduce the cost of reproducing yesterday’s spectacles but feeds the expectation that tomorrow’s will be even more extraordinary. Making movies as franchises reduces the risk that overloaded audiences won’t notice the next film, but magnifies the scale of the debacle if a whole project goes off the rails. (An earlier The Lord of the Rings, planned as two movies, didn’t get past the first, a ‘critical and commercial failure’.118
Alongside these challenges, cinemas have many things going for them. Their primary content, movies, have endured as a form of entertainment through many waves of technological and social change. The biggest blockbusters that are so important to the economics and lustre of the exhibition industry are unpredictable but they seem to turn up regularly enough. The population is aging and older people are going out to see more movies. The larger number of movies being made creates opportunities for festivals and events that can curate and draw bigger audiences to collections of them. Earnings growth for commercial cinemas may be mainly in ‘premium’ experiences, but they can deliver their premium entertainment a good deal cheaper than competitors like musical theatre shows, stadium concerts and the biggest sporting events. Digital distribution and
projection should improve profitability by reducing operating costs, once capital costs are amortised.
) Cinemas’ window of exclusivity for new movies has shrunk. Only one of Australia’s biggest exhibitors has a significant ownership stake in distribution and production that allows it to shape the fare it offers to audiences, although this is not the case for the smaller, art cinema chains.
Australia’s major exhibitors have acted and spoken straight to their shareholders about these challenges and opportunities. Though all still have international exhibition interests, the biggest of them Amalgamated Holdings’ German chain, they have mainly pulled back from the big investments they made in the 1990s at the height of the first phase of the Multiplex Era. All Australia’s major exhibitors are owned by groups that have extensive investments beyond cinema exhibition including theme parks, hotels and property development. Amalgamated, in late- 2010, said its cinemas were in ‘mature markets with limited growth and expansion opportunity’. Village Roadshow told shareholders in November 2012 that theme parks, not cinemas, were the company’s ‘new foundation business’.
Cinemas know that, in the Online Age, their position at the start of the release chain for the popular audiovisual form we call movies is not a fixture but something that has to be earned each weekend, each week, each year.
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