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Cinema revolution

An essay about the future of cinema as I see it.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution posed an interesting question recently, Why are all movies the same price?

Well, not the same price in all cases. Before 6 p.m. is cheaper, there are numerous dollar theaters, and not all films allow for discount coupons. Nonetheless a multiplex will charge the same ($9.50 in my case) for the number one movie and for a flop. Nor is the price more expensive for Saturday night, or during the summer when demand is higher. Can any economic model predict these results?

This was of course of interest to me and is a subject that I’ve been considering recently so I posted the following comment there.

I’m a cinema manager in the UK and there are variations in prices at our cinema throughout the week depending upon the day and time of a screening.

We haven’t tried varying the price for different movies but film distributors are very resistant to any change and wield a lot of power over us. There are actually very few distributors so if one of them decided to not supply us with their movies we would suffer a lot more than they would.

It’s true that most of our profits come from concessions we now seem to be in the popcorn and soft drink business with the movie being an extra on top.

I despair of this sometimes, I think the way things will go is that the movie will be free for purchasers of popcorn. The movie companies will use the theatre release of a movie as a method of marketing for DVD sales and the cinemas will use the movie as a lure for popcorn sales.

Which ties in neatly with the following article from the Washington Post.

An Ever-Shorter Leap From Theater to DVD

“I’ll wait for the DVD.”

It’s the discriminating moviegoer’s mantra, one repeated every time we can’t muster the motivation to catch the latest Hollywood offering in theaters. But in many cases that waiting game has changed, as movies make the leap from silver screen to small screen faster than ever before.

These days the turnaround time from cineplex to DVD is 4 1/2 months, on average, with movies becoming available for rental and sale on the same day… It’s no secret that movie studios, which generally earn more money from home video than box office returns, are eager to capitalize on DVD dollars as soon as they can.

The world has changed around the cinema industry and I don’t believe it hasn’t moved enough to accommodate the changes. There has been a gradual decrease in admissions over the decades with brief upsurges such as with the introduction of multiplexes and the general upgrading of older cinemas with modern facilities such as Dolby Digital sound, but the general trend has been downwards.

The response to falling numbers has been to increase the prices so that they far outstrip the rise in inflation. In real terms the price of cinema admission is many times what it was, to the extent that parents are not bringing their children to the cinema nearly as much as they used to.

The prevailing trend in the business of movie companies is that they make most of their income from the DVD release of movies instead of the theatrical release. The millions of dollars that is put into marketing a movie for it’s theatrical release is equally marketing the DVD release if the gap between the two is only a few months.

We should embrace this trend and slash the price of cinema tickets as neither the movie distributors nor the cinema are making much money from the box office receipts. The theatrical release would become yet another marketing tool for the sale of DVDs for the movie companies and a way of attracting customers into the building for popcorn sales and the like for the cinemas.

I would even go so far as to have no charge at all for children under 10 years of age as this would encourage parents to bring their children to the cinema more often as it would no longer cost them ‘an arm and a leg’. I think if children get into the habit of going to the cinema at a young age they will be more likely to continue to do it as adults.

I think we need a diversification in the cinema model as well as in the movies. Cinemagoers range from those who just want to waste a couple of hours and pop in as they pass by to those who make it a part of a night out, the classic ‘dinner and a movie’ date. To accommodate this we need a range from no-frills establishments to a more upmarket movie theatre with a bar and restaurant.

A major change is coming to cinemas in any case with the major investments into digital projection.

In the UK The Film Council, and in the US maverick billionaire Mark Cuban.

What effect it will have remains to be seen, I hope that it will lead to a revolution in the cinema business model but at the very least it will cut costs.

The present system requires a length of film of around about 2 miles (or 3.5km) for the average movie as movie projectors run at a speed of 90 feet per minute. That is a hell of a lot of film and so it costs thousands of dollars to produce each one, plus if you consider that most big Hollywood movies typically open in thousands of screens in the US it can cost millions of dollars just to get your movie physically to each cinema and in front of the audience.

This is the reason why the UK release date of American movies is months later because we get the movie prints that were used in the US after it has finished screening there, it’s cheaper to ship used prints here than it is to produce new copies.

With digital projectors the cost of distribution comes way down as each copy can then be made far more cheaply and delivered on a DVD-like disc or via the internet. Whilst it merely cuts costs for the big players in the industry the move towards digital projection also opens up the market for the smaller independent filmmakers who can then supply their movie to all the cinemas that wish to take it.

Currently if there are only a small number of prints of a certain movie cinemas will have to wait until a print becomes available and then may end up not taking the movie at all if the delay is too long. Thus the filmmaker has lost potential income just because the cost of making enough prints to satisfy the demand is prohibitive. There is no profit in spending a few thousand pounds to get a movie to a particular cinema if there is only enough audience to make a thousand pounds profit there, but if the cost is less than £100 it becomes a viable option.

With the per movie costs coming down to a negligible level cinemas could then adopt far more flexible business models and take advantage of the long tail and show movies for as long as there is an audience for it instead of packing people in for the latest blockbuster before dumping it and moving onto the next.

New multiplex cinemas could be built with many smaller screens in addition to the few large ones in order to show the less mainstrean movies. We could even let the demand affect the supply directly and allow customers to make bookings over the internet many weeks or months in advance and actually show the movies that people wish to see by scheduling the most popular in the larger screens with the most number of performances. Customers would make an initial booking for a movie and then finalise it closer to the date with a specific performance they would like when a schedule has been created.

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I less than three Doctor Who

But who is Doctor Who?

7.09pm Shop Dummies Come to Life! [CONFIRMED FACT]

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Run Cephalopod Run

You may have seen the running vampire bats, Vampires Run: Bats on treadmills show high-speed gait

Now witness the oddity that is a running octopus.

Article

Direct link to video

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You gotta roll with it.

To help promote their new vacuum cleaner Dyson have created a deviously addictive game where you must navigate a ball through mazes into a hole. The ball moves along at a brisk pace and you just steer it right or left.

Like all great games it is simple to play but hard to master especially if you choose to change the settings for a yet even faster ball.

The Ball Game.

They also produced The Telescope Game, which I became addicted to a year or two ago.

Another of my current internet puzzle game addictions is RayRayParade.

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Freeway revolt

Freeway revolt is a random page from the Wikipedia.

The Freeway Revolt is the name given to public opposition against building freeways through San Francisco, California in the 1950s. It started in 1956 when the San Francisco Chronicle published a map (See image) made in 1947 or 1948 by the San Francisco Planning Department showing possible routes for freeways through the city, and by the construction of the Embarcadero Freeway.

It would have been an excellent name for a rock group in the seventies I think.

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I’m wearing boots of escaping…

Magic Missile real life roleplaying goes a little too far.

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Schneier: ID cards are a waste

ID cards are a waste, says security guru

Bruce Schneier tells Computer Weekly why ID cards could exacerbate crime and why the only way to beat ID theft is to make banks responsible for its prevention.

The UK’s plans for biometric identity cards are a waste of money, one of the world’s leading experts on computer security said this week.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Bruce Schneier, security author and chief technology officer of internet security group Counterpane, said the programme could do more harm than good.

“ID cards are a waste of money. The amount of good they will do is not nearly worth the cost. They will not reduce crime, fraud or illegal immigration,” he said.

The adoption of ID cards would encourage criminals to attempt forgeries, he said, potentially exacerbating crime rather than reducing it.

“Every credential has been forged. As you make a credential more valuable, there is more impetus to forge it. The reason identity theft is so nasty now is that your identity is so much more valuable than it used to be. By putting in the infrastructure, we have made the crime more common. That’s scary.”

He said the UK government, like other governments around the world, was investing in the technology as a form of control but marketing it as better security.

“We are living in a world where governments are looking for more control. They are looking for measures that increase control. It is being sold as security but it is really control,” he said.

Schneier said that the US plans to spend £10bn on a programme to build checkpoints at airports to prevent terrorists boarding planes are a similar waste of money.

“If you had a list of people that were so dangerous you would never let them on an aircraft and £10bn, would you build a series of checkpoints at airports just in case they happened to walk through them, or hire FBI agents to investigate those people?” he said.

“We are building a security system that only works if the terrorist happens to choose the tactic of going on an aircraft, yet we are affecting the privacy of every airline passenger.”

Schneier said ID theft will only be solved when banks are given responsibility to prevent it. “As soon as it becomes the banks’ problem, it will be solved. The entity that is responsible for the risk will mitigate the risk.”

Credit card fraud in the US fell dramatically after the banks become responsible for refunding customers with losses of more than £25 caused by fraud, he said.

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Video game rants

I read IGDA Session: Burning Down The House – Game Developers Rant and found myself agreeing with most of what the developers are ranting about particularly the opening gambit of Warren Spector.

OK. I don’t feel very ranty actually. I tried to bail on this panel. But I have to say something so I want to say how this business is hopelessly broken. Haha. We’re doing pretty much everything wrong. This is at the root of much of what you’re gonna hear today. Games cost too much. They take too long to make. The whole concept of word of mouth, remember that? Holy cow it was nice.

I’ve mentioned before of my own disatisfaction with modern video games, now I love Halo 2 as much as the next guy or gal but was it worth the money? I finished the campaign surprisingly quickly in fact it caught me by surprise that I had finished it as the storyline isn’t entirely completed it is left as a cliffhanger and I’m left waiting for the inevitable Halo 3.

But Halo 2 ain’t just about the campaign there’s the multiplayer mode which are fun as hell but are they really any different than in the original Halo, okay so it incorporates Xbox Live so you can play against people on the other side of the world, but is that any better than playing against someone who’s in the same room.

But at least Halo 2 does have the multiplayer option so it has some longevity to it, most games now have adopted the narrative format i.e. you play the part of a character in a story, gameplay has become secondary to the narrative, but the trouble with that sort of game is that once the story is over the game stops being fun.

With the improvement in graphics technology video games have moved more and more towards being interactive films which is apparently what game buyers want or is it? Maybe now that I’ve hit 30 years of age I’ve become a curmudgeon that is out of touch telling the kids that video games were much better in my day even though the graphics were shite and blocky and only two dimensional.

I’m currently seeking video game satisfaction via a regression to my younger self by purchasing via eBay a Nintendo 64 Console and
Mario Kart 64 for a total of £28 including postage which is less than I’d pay for a game for my Xbox and yet hopefully I’d get as many hours of fun from it as I did years back when I played it at a mate’s house. I’ve also considered a further regression by reliving my Sega Megadrive days and Sonic the Hedgehog in the form of the Sonic Mega Collection.

A possible solution to this problem is the MMORPG which allows a player to participate in an unending narrative but I’m even burnt out on this type of game having achieved a relatively high level on Asheron’s Call I lack the motivation to go through virtually the same experience on a newer version or a similar thing like World of Warcraft.

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Shun Da Vinci Code

Reuters: Cardinal Urges Catholics to Shun Da Vinci Code

The cardinal leading the Vatican’s charge against The Da Vinci Code urged Catholics on Wednesday to shun it like rotten food and branded the bestseller “a sack full of lies” insulting the Christian faith.

In an interview with Reuters inside the Vatican, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone also said Catholic bookstores should take the thriller off their shelves and accused U.S. author Dan Brown of “deplorable” behavior.

“Don’t buy this. Don’t read this because this is rotten food,” said Bertone, the highest ranking Catholic churchman to speak out against the blockbuster…

The central tenet of the book is that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children. Christians are taught that Jesus never married, was crucified and rose from the dead.

“We can’t keep quiet about the truth when faced with all the lies and all the inventions in this book,” Bertone said.

Lies and inventions eh? I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that the book is a work of fiction, albeit one that many readers have taken as being based upon fact. Surely by expressing an opinion officially The Vatican is adding fuel to the fire of the ‘truth’ of the Da Vinci Code.

Sure shun the book but do it because it ain’t a great piece of writing not because it is heretical. It is after all just a story…

or is it.

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Klaus and his crazy workplace mishaps…

with a forklift. (movie-wmv)

I laughed so hard at this, it is a brilliantly gory black comedy short.

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