A Home Run

By Greg Reifsteck

The "home theatre" has finally become a reality, and the exhibitors who run the cineplexes are getting restless. The price of DVDs is dropping, and as John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) put it at ShoWest 2005, "The window between theatrical and DVD/video release... is certainly something of grave concern to our members as it continues to shrink rather precipitously."

As a result, consumers have decked out their living rooms into cool, customized places in which to see movies. We live in a digital age and people are no longer going out to the multiplex; it just doesn't have the same mystique or appeal it once did, except for the summer event films and the Oscar movies.

That's when the communal spirit seems to be the strongest; when the "it" films are showing. Consider the enormous impact Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith has made on the marketplace. Thanks to presales and midnight showings, the film shattered records with a $50 million opening-day domestic take. By the time you read this article, the film will have easily hit the $1 billion mark worldwide on the all-time box office chart, climbing toward the Titanic gold standard.

But the box-office crickets are chirping louder and louder as the gap between those coveted seasons is getting larger and larger. Is this a herd mentality? Are moviegoers only drawn to the theatres when they know there is going to be a pop-culture phenomenon on the screen?

This would seem to be the trend, as genre films and franchises are far surpassing dramas in their box-office take. This high-stakes market would also explain why event pictures with an average price tag close to $80 million are the norm for studios.

And let's not forget family fare, for which box office has soared in recent years. This has become the ultimate communal experience, with families carpooling to watch mostly animated fare.

But again, in today's economy, babysitters and gas aren't getting any cheaper, and the bill for hauling the family out to the multiplex and concession stand is enough to make a credit card buckle.

A Numbers Racket

The sultans of stadium seating know they are at a crossroads. The facts are in the figures. After a steady rise in admissions from 1.4 billion in 2000 to 1.63 billion in 2002, the bottom is falling out of the market. In 2004, the number of people passing the ticket counter had shrunk to 1.53 billion. Several factors play into this drop, including rising admission prices.

NATO's Fithian argues that "compared to other out-of-home entertainment options, movies remain more affordable and continue to experience slower increases in prices." He says that last year, the average ticket price hit $6.21, up 3 percent over the 2003 figure of $6.03. Fithian noted that the 3 percent increase was less than the 3.3 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for the year.

What Fithian fails to point out is that the average admission price was $5.06 in 1999, so that today's prices mark a 22 percent increase over five years. It's no surprise, given these prices, that people might be drawn to buying that bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith for $10 from a street corner vendor or eBay.

Yes, piracy is the biggest battle the exhibitors and filmmakers are fighting, especially in foreign markets. The money they are losing from admissions is a small skirmish in comparison. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its international counterpart, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), estimate that the U.S. film industry loses in excess of $3 billion annually in potential worldwide revenue due to piracy.

Law enforcement hasn't been chilling at the donut shop.

In 2003, 84 percent of pirate discs seized globally were in the Asia-Pacific region. This included 98 percent of pirated VCDs and 75 percent of pirated DVDs. Recently, syndicates of pirates have been producing and distributing smaller volumes of illegal DVD-Rs, the region's fastest growing pirate format, from homes and/or small business premises. This has emerged as the most difficult-to-detect and thorniest problem.

But an even greater concern is the connection between global pirate syndicates and organized crime in the U.S. This makes battling disc piracy more complicated and dangerous.

In 2003, MPA operations in the Asia-Pacific region investigated nearly 15,500 cases of piracy and assisted law enforcement officials in conducting nearly 13,000 raids. These activities resulted in the seizure of approximately 44 million illegal optical discs and the initiation of almost 9,100 legal actions.

Despite these actions, getting hold of a film domestically is still only a few keystrokes away - sometimes a few days after its release, but in most cases days before.

Some on-line sharing services, including Kazaa and eMule, had more than 300 different listings of The Longest Yard remake a week before its release, under titles such as The Longest Yard: The Pirated Projector Cut.

All it takes is a DVD burner, and suddenly you and your friends have just bypassed the ticket line. Sure, you might have to put up with a tiled angle shot by a DV camera and poor picture quality. Still, you are watching Adam Sandler pass the pigskin for the price of a DSL hookup.

Exhibitors are trying to fight back with ads they have placed on legal DVDs, explaining to consumers that stealing a movie off the Internet is tantamount to stealing a DVD off the store shelf.

As Fithian stated at ShoWest, "Piracy is a problem that we have to attack in many different ways. We have to educate our employees on how to detect and thwart it, and our patrons about the fact that it is wrong, illegal and counterproductive... And we need tougher laws that are enforced to stop piracy from occurring. The biggest policy initiative now is to seek outlawing the recording of movies in movie theatres."

Quality Equals Quantity

Thank goodness the majority of home-theatre-philes won't stand for bootleg quality. They want high-end products and equipment to show off the fact that you can enjoy a film even more at home, away from the sticky floors and overpriced concessions. And they want the same DTS, THX and Surround Sound they get at the theatre.

As a journalist working in the Bush economy, I balked at getting a new home-theatre system; I thought plasma screen TVs and wireless speakers were way out of my budget. And I thought the sound systems were becoming way overpriced. But after walking around with Ken Cranes Home Entertainment sales associate Marshall Kanda, I realized the time is now to upgrade my old Pioneer receiver and subwoofer and JBL speakers. The home-theatre market is booming because, as with all new technologies, the cost becomes affordable to everyone eventually (remember the $1,200 VCR or the $600 DVD player?).

Putting the equivalent of a movie screen in your own living room won't set you back too far. The biggest seller on the market for affordable flatscreens is Panasonic, and for those wanting to have the coolest widescreen on their block there's the Pioneer Elite line.

Kanda claims Ken Cranes will "end up selling a million" of the brand new 42-inch Panasonic TH-42PX5OU plasma screen TV with built-in HD. The set is only 4 inches deep and has built-in ATSC and QAM tuners which make it simple to enjoy brilliant over-the-air high-definition and digital broadcasts right out of the box. It is also CableCARD^TM ready, so you no longer need a cable box. The sleek-looking set is only $3,500.

For those wanting to go higher into the plasma realm, the 50-inch Pioneer Elite Purevision Pro 1120, with its slick, black lacquer finish, is the way to go. The HD-ready set transmits more than 3 billion different colors and was a recent top choice of Sound & Vision magazine. The sticker price will set you back around $5,000, but your house will be packed come Super Bowl Sunday, or when the new Pixar movie hits DVD.

To make your neighbors' walls shake proudly when you pop in that new Sin City DVD, pick up a new Yamaha YSP-1 Digital Sound Projector. This new breed of "sound solution" is based around technology developed over the past seven years in Cambridge, England, by 1 Ltd, a small hi-tech R & D IP-licensing company. Gone are the days of pesky wires running up to speakers mounted near your ceiling. The YSP-1 is a single slim speaker that mounts on the wall beneath any flatscreen, projecting 42 separate channels of digital amplification. The result is true surround-sound from one simple unit.

Entering the New Dimension

How can exhibitors compete with the increasing attraction of staying at home to watch the latest films? What steps can they take to convince home theatre buffs to get off the couch and come back to the concession stands, once again embracing the communal spirit of the multiplex?

If the technologies revealed at the last ShoWest are any indication, exhibitors are not only turning to digital cinema to save their dropping admissions but are using the technology to up the ante even further, turning back the clock to gimmicks of yesteryear in the process.

Rumors had abounded that the flimsy 3-D cardboard glasses were coming back with the release of Warner/Dark Castle's 2005 remake of House of Wax from 1953. It was instead put into release in the regular format. But much more prominent mega-budget directors have been backing the development of 3-D technology to offer consumers something that is still far too costly for home theatres.

Back in the early 1980s, the 3-D gimmick attempted to make its first comeback since the '50s, with meager fare such as the western Comin' at Ya! (1981) and Jaws 3-D (1983). Since they were helmed by lackluster filmmakers and had little attraction apart from their cheesy 3-D gimmicks, the fad ended before it started.

But with heavy hitters such as George Lucas, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Rodriguez and Peter Jackson on board for the latest attempt at putting 3-D cinema in the moviegoer's face, the masses may pay attention.

They were all at ShoWest plugging a new proprietary process created by the California company In-Three, which can convert any motion picture into 3-D. Utilizing a single Christie CP2000 digital projector and a QuVIS dual-stream digital-cinema server, the Dimensionalized 3-D presentation included the first six minutes of the original Star Wars in 3-D, plus conversions of scenes from Top Gun, The Lord of the Rings and Lilo & Stitch.

Also revealed were Lucas's plans to re-release the original Star Wars trilogy in the new 3-D process. Cameron went one step further by boasting that all of his future projects, including his upcoming Battle Angel, will be in 3-D.

Is a gimmick like 3-D going to be the ace up the film industry's sleeve to get exhibitors to make digital projection mandatory in theatres? Could this also be a way to lure audiences away from their home theatres and back to the collective experience of the movie complex?

We'll have to take a wait-and-see stance. Personally, if they remake The Tingler, William Castle's literally shocking 1959 classic, complete with technology that will Taser me in my seat, I might be persuaded to give my new plasma screen a rest for a while.

Illustration by Jeremie Lederman