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Entertainment

Hollywoodstein Hobbled!

Dare to dream of digital filmtopia. Something for everyone, thanks to 'the long tail.'

Rob Peters 11 Oct 2006TheTyee.ca

Rob Peters is navigating the harsh vicissitudes of life

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End of the monster blockbuster?

"Video Killed the Radio Star," the Buggles sang in 1979. Will digital kill the movie palace?

Movies are in a major period of flux. We watch them on phones, laptops and sophisticated home theatre systems. DVD clubs like Zip can deliver almost any film directly to your door. Bit torrents make movie downloading increasingly realistic. Cable companies offer movies on demand. Marketing has been turned on its head by fan sites, citizen reviews and bloggers.

It's a major cultural shift. But will the movies we watch be any better? Is the blockbuster on notice? Will popular tastes change because we have easy access to so much variety? What will happen to the traditional movie theatre, and the corner video store? Will all this access create a new canon of classics?

Or will technology just dress up old habits in new clothes?

Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson has offered one brave prediction. His long-tail theory, first published as a Wired article in 2004 and expanded into a book this July, says the rules have fundamentally changed. Anderson argues the Internet's negligible storage and distribution costs make it not only possible but profitable to sell enormous online catalogues.

If a typical video store offers 4,000 popular titles and rents each 100 times, an Internet company with unlimited online storage can offer 40,000 titles and sell each just 10 times to net the same profits. That extra 36,000 titles is the "long tail" -- the cult movies, documentaries, vintage films and obscure independent releases that were once hard to access.

Do we know what we like?

Anderson believes that with all this access to movie content, we'll find out we don't like blockbusters as much as we think we do. "The primary effect of the long tail is to shift our taste toward niches," Anderson writes. He figures when we're exposed to films that are better than the usual Hollywood offering of teenage male-oriented remakes and sequels, we'll develop tastes for them.

UBC film professor Ernest Mathijs believes we're already developing "many different islands of tastes" because of "the wider array of ways in which you can get in touch with movies."

Not everyone agrees, however, that the effect will be widespread or enduring. "Initially, just like with the release of videos when they first became a phenomenon, people are going to catch up and see the films they missed," said long-time movie industry veteran and marketing consultant Howard Lichtman. "There'll be a couple years of it dramatically affecting the industry. But over time it will all stabilize."

Nevertheless, many businesses are betting on the long tail. Zip (in Canada) and Netflix (in the U.S.) are two of the biggest DVD-by-mail clubs; they now offer movie catalogues in excess of 50,000 titles, thanks to centralized storage and distribution, cheap delivery via mail, and a high degree of computerization. "We use 80 per cent of our title universe every month," said Zip CEO Rick Anderson. And the long-tail effect is real. "Twenty-five per cent of our demand is dispersed over 46,000 titles."

In Vancouver, Videomatica has also entered the DVD delivery game. Co-owner Graham Peat says they've been successful for over 20 years by adapting to new technologies and needs, and the shift to mail delivery was a logical step. "Maybe we're nuts, but we've taken on companies like ZIP doing DVD direct by mail," he said. "We feel that we are a long-tail store, and our catalogue is long tail."

In the last few years, Peat has seen a shift away from mainstream film toward the more obscure. "I think it's absolutely true what Chris Anderson is saying," Peat said. "It amazes me when I take a sampling of what people are watching. They take the time to dig through our entire catalogue."

The rise of the alt-doc

One component of the long tail that has enjoyed a rise in popularity is the documentary -- Michael Moore's films, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and, most recently, Who Killed the Electric Car. Joel Bakan, lawyer, author, filmmaker and part of the team that made The Corporation, feels there's increased exposure for "alternative" content. "You do see what seems to be a bit of a renaissance of independent filmmaking, especially in the United States and Canada, as well as in Europe, and especially with respect to documentaries."

As popular tastes become more specialized, blogs, fan sites and citizen reviews are increasingly important parts of the marketing equation. "The whole way films are marketed has changed," says Terrell Falk, vice president of marketing and communications at Cinemark. "And it's because of the Internet, and being able to reach these smaller interest groups. Marketing before was, you get your message out to as many places as you can and whatever sticks, sticks. Now you have to pinpoint your message."

All this has led some, like Chris Anderson, to predict the demise of the movie theatre and its complement, the blockbuster. So are we destined to spend our future Friday and Saturday nights sitting at home, downloading obscure documentaries and cult films?

Not likely.

Hollywood's not dead yet

The increased emphasis on alternative content and home viewing may make shared public consumption of mass cultural phenomenon even more vital. We may be overjoyed by the prospect of amassing the entire catalogue of German Heimatfilm on our laptops, but we still want to talk about The Da Vinci Code at the water cooler. "There's some kind of communal desire to be tapped into the same content," says Bakan. "We don't want to consume just our own little pieces of culture, but we want to consume culture that we know other people are consuming."

As evidence, we need look no further than Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The sequel had the biggest three-day opening in history -- grabbing a third of total North American box-office receipts on its opening weekend in July. Its worldwide gross now tops $1 billion.

What's more, movie theatre attendance in Canada was up in 2004-05, according to Statistics Canada, after a slight dip the previous year. Curiously, however, the increase was mainly due to a 20 per cent spike in drive-in attendance. And although revenue from distribution to movie theatres grew 16.6 per cent, while DVD and video distribution remained unchanged, the latter still trumped the former -- generating $1.8 billion in revenue, compared with $446 million for the old cinema palace.

Perhaps, then, the rise of the long tail isn't going to topple the cineplexes (which will soon undergo their own technological revolution when digital projection does away with all those film reels). Rather, it might just turn the theatre experience into yet another niche.

Rob Peters last wrote for The Tyee about "The Quest for the Perfect Pub."

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