Big Changes Coming

In last month’s editorial, I talked about home theater as a viable alternative to the traditional movie theater. Several things have happened since then to support that view.

I recently traveled to Gaithersburg, Maryland, to meet a friend for dinner. That’s 40 miles closer to Washington, DC, than I am here in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. I got to the meeting point a half-hour early, and dropped in to the Best Buy in the shopping center. Compared to my quieter Circuit City in Winchester, Virginia, this store was manic. Customers swarmed like bees around displays of big-screen TVs and Apple iPods. A row of high-powered audio receivers was collecting dust -- not one potential customer paid any attention to them. But video curiosity and sales were brisk.

The day before, I’d attended a 3:15 matinee showing of The Da Vinci Code. There were eight of us in the theater -- barely enough revenue to pay the electric bill, and surely not enough to pay the high school kid who swept up and monitored the theater once an hour. (A huge percentage of the box-office take goes to the film studio, not the individual theater.)

Later that week I breezed through the entertainment section at my local Wal-Mart. The chain is now hyping DirecTV and high-definition television at amazingly low prices, and in my town -- and probably in yours -- like it or not, Wal-Mart calls a lot of shots. This store was also doing a brisk business in iPods and the like. There were no audio separates in sight, just boom boxes and video speaker sets -- and a boxed set of the first two X-Men movies, with all the extras, for $14.95.

From all of this, I could conclude only that video, which used to be the add-on component in a home-entertainment system, has become the focus and center of the home-entertainment experience. Not is becoming -- the change has already happened. The movie-theater experience is going downhill. Theater chains have nothing new to offer except higher prices and cookie-cutter multiplexes, and people are increasingly staying home to watch expensive -- and less expensive -- home-theater gear. And soon they’ll likely be watching an HD DVD disc that cost less than a single ticket to the theater and can be enjoyed a second, a third, and a 20th time. I’ll be one of them.

People will still go to theaters for blockbuster releases and dates. But for run-of-the-mill releases, more and more they’ll just stay home. Hollywood already states that half of its earnings for a movie come from the DVD sales. It had better brace for that number to go up, and I haven’t even gotten into the whole Pandora’s Box of movie downloads. Hollywood must restructure itself and become proactive, instead of reactive, or it will face huge problems.

One answer might be to release movies simultaneously in the theaters, on cable, and on DVD. Director Steven Soderbergh tried this recently with Bubble. But the film, made with a cast of non-actors, was awful; I don’t think it was a fair test. I sat there thinking how great it might have been with Kathy Bates in the lead. Most people see enough reality without having it brought into their living room in HD. In fairness, others eat up reality shows. But Bubble was, I think, only the beginning. Soon we’ll see more professionally produced first-run movies released day and date on DVD and in theaters.

One good place to start would be with documentaries. Few of these are ever released to more than a handful of theaters. Each year, when the Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary are announced, how many have you seen? I’m sure that few of us living outside major metropolitan areas have seen more than one. The early-adopter hi-def cable channels relied heavily on documentaries for their repertory, and many still do. The HD crowd is used to documentaries, so a day-and-date deal on those titles would have a built-in audience.

It will then be only a matter of time before the next Mission: Impossible film goes day and date. If that sounds crazy, then the power of video, home theater, and the computer in our lives is greater than you think. Things are changing rapidly. Remember when video used to serve Hollywood? It’s about to flip. The next five years will be undeniably exciting, but, as Bette Davis said in All About Eve, "Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride."

 ...Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com

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