noskilz writes:

"Do you think the rapid turnaround from theater to dvd is a problem? One of my friends refers to theatrical releases as "trailers for the dvd" and I usually don't worry about catching a film at the theater unless it's the sort of thing likely to benefit from a gigantic screen and sound system."

I think the rapid turnaround from theater to DVD is a problem -- but apparently not for the corporations that own the movie studios.

DVD has, unquestionably, changed the movie industry. It used to be, a movie came out in theaters, then came out on video a year later. Video was the "paperback version" of the movie. You could own a copy of Batman! The quality wasn't that great, and usually the image was cropped "to fit your TV screen," but it was better than nothing -- you could watch your favorite movies any time you wanted, usually for the price of two tickets.

Then, the money-counters at the studios noticed that they could make more money faster if they brought the video out faster -- usually six months faster. Thus, the summer blockbusters became the Christmas stocking-stuffers. And the money-counters were pleased.

Then, relatively recently, the heads of all the studios were all fired and replaced with corporate types. Corporations, the reader will recall, report their income quarterly. To a corporate type, the key to keeping one's job is to have each quarter do better than the last. Thus, it was deemed wise to have movies come out one quarter after their theatrical release.

And yes, noskilz's friend is correct: for all intents and purposes, a theatrical release is a trailer for the DVD. A theatrical release is a virtual no-win situation for a studio -- the costs are so astronomically high that, unless one has a hit on the scale of The Dark Knight, a studio cannot turn a profit on a theatrical release. For the vast bulk of movies, the theatrical release is merely one small part of a vast promotional scheme designed to promote the value of the movie in future ancillary venues: DVD, cable, airplanes, web-streams, iphone downloads, toys, stickers, lunchboxes, temporary tattoos and what have you. The purpose of a studio (WB, Paramount, Universal, Fox) is to supply its corporate parent with a quarterly stream of "content" which it can then sell to these mulitudinous venues on a quarterly basis -- to keep that red line on the chart going up, up, up -- so that the corporate heads can keep their jobs.

Now then: as noskilz's friend has found, the quarterly-release pattern has created a situation where a movie comes out and the audience sees the ad in the paper and cannot find a compelling reason to go see that movie in a theater. It does not matter if a movie is chockablock full of stars and has a dynamite hook, if it lacks a certain something an audience will stay away and most likely wait the three months until it shows up on DVD.

This has, inevitably, changed the shape and tone of movies. One studio executive put it to me this way: to have a movie succeed in a theatrical release, it must deliver an experience that cannot be reproduced at home -- that is, it must be something that will compel people to want to see it in a crowd, on a big screen, with excellent sound and projection -- on opening weekend. This executive provided me with a list of those things people will pay money to experience in large numbers. The list is: spectacle, comedy, fear and stars. They like to see things they've never seen before, they like to laugh together, they like to scream together, and they like to project their hopes and dreams on their favorite screen idols. And so, our movie theaters brim to overflowing with genre fare -- thrillers, comedies, horror movies and spectacles. Dramas, the kind of movies that used to win Oscars, are made by "other people" -- studios are no longer interested in them, even "at a price." George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett could make a stirring drama that plumbs the depths of the human soul for a budget of $4.95 and the studios would still not be interested. Even if they got the movie for free, it would still cost them too much to market and distribute the movie to make it profitable for them.

Comedies, as we have seen, are doing very well at the moment. The studios like them because they are cheap to make and have a reliable audience. Cast Vince Vaughn or Seth Rogen or Will Ferrell or Steve Karell or Paul Rudd in it, and make it vaguely raunchy and appealing to an adolescent mind-set, and you've got a license to print money. Horror, also, is very appealing to studios, although the gut-level horror of something like Saw a major studio won't touch -- they like to consider themselves above the fray. (I enjoy a good number of horror movies, but my agents won't even allow me to consider writing one -- they tell me they won't read it, "they don't go to see movies like that." Well, maybe they don't, but plenty of other people do.) Spectacle has always been what movies do best, but to put something on screen that no one has ever seen before becomes more and more expensive every day. Stars, on the other hand, are rapidly losing their power in movie-land -- only Will Smith seems to be able to make absolutely anything a hit, whether it's an action-horror spectacle, a romantic comedy or a touching personal drama. "Chick flicks" are also cheap to make, but the market is much more difficult to pin down: miss the bullseye and you have the worst of all worlds: a $30 million movie that costs $60 million to promote and has limited ancillary potential.

Find a way to combine spectacle, comedy, horror and stars and you've got a huge hit: Ghostbusters. The Dark Knight thrills and frightens, contains a reasonable amount of spectacle and delivers a tremendous star-turn by a recently-dead actor. Pirates of the Caribbean provides all kinds of specatcle, a reasonable amount of comedy and an unexpected star-turn from an interesting actor who was not quite a movie star at the time it was made.

Movies, they say, are a dying art form, and I'm sure that that's true. Theater was once a dying art form, but I look around and see that there are still people putting on plays. Maybe people will still be going to see movies in a hundred years and maybe they won't. Maybe movies are simply going through a change the way they did in the 1950s, when they were forced to differentiate themselves from television. (Television, it's worth noting, has its own troubles -- lots of people simply don't watch it any more, and if they do they don't watch it the way people watched it a generation ago. They spend their time playing video games and surfing the internet, and if they watch TV they can watch it on their computer or on their DVR.) For now, movies are mostly big, loud and dumb, and occasionally big, loud and smart.