As I discussed in the first three
parts (here,
here,
and here)
of this short series on the future of film, the landscape of movie and
television entertainment is shifting beneath us. What does this mean for people
who love movies (and who doesn’t?)?
Hollywood has taken a big hit in
recent years from a floundering economy just like everyone else. Major-studio
specialty divisions like Disney’s Miramax,
which produced the kinds of movies we think of as “independent” but aren’t,
have undergone
near-extinction. Meanwhile the studios’
feature film business model seems to increasingly veer in two directions: highly
profitable low-budget flicks such as the Paranormal
Activity horror series, and massively-budgeted spectacles with franchise,
merchandising, and even theme-park potential, “tentpole” pictures such as Harry Potter or Transformers.
By focusing on the tentpole pictures to the exclusion of the tent itself, Hollywood studios have gradually abandoned the middle ground of high-quality films with low-to-midrange budgets. This presents exciting opportunities for creative, truly independent production companies, outside the often stultifying studio system, to fill that void – if they can find the money, which is increasingly coming, when it comes at all, from overseas (and that introduces a whole other dynamic which I don’t have space to address here). Yes, the studios still have a vested interest in making Oscar-worthy fare to bolster their artistic prestige, but I predict the real wave of the future for quality movie entertainment will come from these true independents, as the studios cease being the gatekeepers to visionary new filmmakers.
By focusing on the tentpole pictures to the exclusion of the tent itself, Hollywood studios have gradually abandoned the middle ground of high-quality films with low-to-midrange budgets. This presents exciting opportunities for creative, truly independent production companies, outside the often stultifying studio system, to fill that void – if they can find the money, which is increasingly coming, when it comes at all, from overseas (and that introduces a whole other dynamic which I don’t have space to address here). Yes, the studios still have a vested interest in making Oscar-worthy fare to bolster their artistic prestige, but I predict the real wave of the future for quality movie entertainment will come from these true independents, as the studios cease being the gatekeepers to visionary new filmmakers.
There is also the question of the
future of the filmmaking process itself, since directors are now moving away
from celluloid to digital, which brings with it a new aesthetic. Some are trying
to remain true to the film format while admitting
they are fighting a losing battle against the rising digital tide. Django Unchained director Quentin Tarantino
even hinted
recently that he will retire soon, thanks to the digital revolution. “I hate
that stuff,” he said. “I shoot film.”
As more filmmakers go digital and
greater numbers of people watch TV and movies on smartphones and tablets rather
than the big screen, what happens to the film-viewing experience itself? New Yorker critic David Denby writes in
his book Do
the Movies Have a Future? about his experience watching Pirates of the Caribbean on a video iPod
with a 2-inch screen, propped up on his stomach:
On my belly, the Caribbean skeletons danced; their bones
looked like pieces of string dipped in Elmer’s glue. With a groan, I tried to
suppress memories of camels making their stately way across a seventy-foot-wide
screen in Lawrence of Arabia. On the
iPod the camels would traverse my thumb. Is this any way to see a movie?
Denby says that “the video iPod
and other handheld devices are being sold as movie exhibition spaces, and they
certainly will function that way for kids.” The problem is that “every kind of
screen comes with its own aesthetic and imposes its own social experience on
moviegoers… Kids who get hooked on watching movies on a portable handheld
device will be settling for a lesser experience, even if they don’t know it
yet.” This is bad news for generations of moviegoers who fell in love with the simultaneously
intimate and communal immersion of the cinema experience.
The good, or at least hopeful,
news is that regardless of the technological medium and how it shapes our viewing
habits, humans are, above all, storytellers – and will remain so. Jonathan
Gottschall makes a point in his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us
Human about the future of the
novel that could apply equally to the feature film: “We will be creatures of
story if sawed-off attention spans or technological advances ever render the
novel obsolete. Story evolves.” And so will we as storytellers and audiences.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 1/24/13)
