It took far longer for the quality of high-definition (HD) digital video cameras to catch up to superior 35-millimeter cameras, which required cameramen to reload ten-minute film magazines. Film was expensive, so time was precious. And every day, the filmmakers would wait to get back the “dailies” of the previous day’s shooting. In the documentary Side by Side, David Fincher describes feeling the day-after “betrayal of dailies” as he watched reels of film from the previous day’s shooting that did not turn out the way they were planned. He is among many directors who have cheered the slow improvement in the quality of digital cameras, which can run for forty minutes, from the Sony Camcorder to 2005’s widely accepted Red digital camera, followed by the Arriflex.
Both George Lucas and director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle (who shot the Danish Dogma film The Celebration in HD) prefer the accuracy of the instant playback that digital provides. What you see is what you get. “That’s exactly the way it’s going to be in a movie theater,” says Lucas. Even 35-millimeter diehards like Oliver Stone prefer the pristine consistency of digital projection over worn, scratched prints. Eventually, the disruptive technology became accepted by the establishment. When director Danny Boyle hired Mantle to run through Mumbai holding small gyro-stabilized cameras for 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, the Academy awarded Mantle the first Cinematography Oscar for a digitally shot film.
Many major directors refuse to go digital: Paul Thomas Anderson shot his post–World War II drama The Master on 70 millimeter, but when the time came to release it in September 2012, he was hunting for theaters around the country equipped with 70-millimeter projectors. Most were not, so the film was either shown in 35 or digitally. He’s shooting his next for Warner on 35 millimeter.
Christopher Nolan still shoots in 35 millimeter, with increasing swatches filmed with IMAX cameras. His concession to bigness is to have his films, from Inception and The Dark Knight Rises to his next, Interstellar, blown up into the giant IMAX digital format. But while 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises was shot on celluloid, it was shown digitally in most theaters.
That transition took longer still, because installing digital projectors in theaters required massive and costly upgrades. Each digital projector cost from $50 to $150,000 to install, depending on quality and complexity, from lower-resolution 2K (2048×1080 or 2.2 megapixels) to 4K (4096×2160 or 8.8 megapixels). Theater chains began slowly adding digital projectors starting in 1999.
The studios had a major incentive for wanting to save money on prints and shipping: fifteen hundred dollars to print and ship each movie to some four thousand theaters around the country costs them millions a year. But even the biggest theater chains, which were prepared to go digital, balked at paying for the massive upgrades themselves. It took years, but in 2005, Disney, Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros. created a set of financing instruments—called Digital Cinema Initiatives—that they could fund in order to assist theaters to upgrade to digital projectors.
A 3-D REVOLUTION
The studio wedge with exhibitors—the real engine of the switchover to digital—was 3-D. As competition from cable, television, music, and video games increased, and marketing dollars skyrocketed as the studios tried to make enough noise with louder and bigger event movies, they needed to find exciting eye candy to lure audiences to the multiplex.
Early promoters of 3-D, which had become more viable with computer-driven digital technology, were tech whizzes Lucas, James Cameron, and Bob Zemeckis, who schlepped to the NATO convention in Las Vegas back in 2005 (with Peter Jackson appearing at the convention on video) to coax the exhibitors into making the move to digital. Lucas was an early adopter of digital cameras and computer-graphic environments at Lucasfilm, and announced that he would reformat the Star Wars trilogy in 3-D, starting the lucrative trend of 3-D rereleases in advance of DVD reissues.
Jackson, Cameron, and Zemeckis, all pioneers in CG visual effects, could see where the future was headed. It was in 2004 that Zemeckis’s innovative live-action/animation hybrid The Polar Express was released in IMAX 3-D at sixty-six IMAX locations and in 2-D at 3,600 other theaters. Exhibitors noted that, remarkably, the IMAX screens delivered fully 25 percent of the total gross. For Man of Steel’s 2013 opening weekend in North America they delivered 12 percent.
Disney helped lead the way with 2005’s 3-D animation feature Chicken Little, which was an expensive experiment at the time. Just three years later, the studio’s Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert was a surprise hit in 3-D, as was the animated feature Bolt. Add several well-grossing B-horror flicks, and theater owners saw the light: they could make more money by charging premium ticket prices. That turned the tide.
In 2009, Cameron’s global blockbuster Avatar was shot in 3-D with special side-by-side stereoscopic cameras designed by the filmmaker and Vince Pace. It was soon followed by Tim Burton’s reformatted 2010 Alice in Wonderland, which also made scads of money in 3-D. Then the studios promptly churned out a surge of trashy 3-D movies, many of them cheaply reformatted after they were shot, such as Clash of the Titans, which served to dampen audience appetites for the new fad. The bloom was soon off the rose.
Plenty of moviegoers hate 3-D. Filmmakers know that they can get an easy roar of approval from the crowd at Comic-Con panels by disparaging the 3-D format. Their complaints? The premium ticket cost, the pesky glasses, and the darker screen (theaters often allow as much as a 30 percent reduction in image brightness to save money).
During the next three years, the studios had settled into a better sense of when to deploy 3-D, from high-end animation and comic-book movies to low-brow eye-poking genre fare. And filmmakers started to figure out that 3-D was a clever way to score higher budgets from studios. In 2011, even Steven Spielberg, who loves shooting in 35 millimeter, decided to learn the 3-D ropes via his collaboration with Peter Jackson on the performance-capture family film The Adventures of Tintin, and Martin Scorsese significantly advanced the art of 3-D with his Oscar-winning Hugo.
At CinemaCon in 2012, Ang Lee wows exhibitors with the first footage from his upcoming Life of Pi. The footage from the movie, three and a half years in the making, is nothing short of stunning and instantly generates Oscar talk. When I interview him, Lee admits that the picture might not have gotten funded if he hadn’t come up with the idea of shooting the movie as a 3-D VFX epic—well before the release of Avatar. But that wasn’t the only reason the film was stalled so long. Before 2008 the technology simply hadn’t existed to achieve the tiger-in-the-lifeboat aspects of Yann Martel’s 2001 bestseller about an Indian boy surviving alone on the high seas (seven million copies sold). He reminds me that this is just the beginning of learning how to use this 3-D technology.
Fox cochairmen Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos tell the CinemaCon 2012 exhibitors that Life of Pi combines their substantial R & D on Avatar and Rise of the Planet of the Apes with Lee’s artistry. (Both real and CG tigers were used.) “It’s an attempt to put you in an emotional space,” Lee says at the presentation. An Oscar contender is born.
At an exhibitor luncheon program held during the convention, Lee and Scorsese compare notes on the aesthetics of 3-D, revealing how individual each director’s approach to the technology can be. As each one discovers and pushes the limits of this filmmaking tool, which Scorsese suggests could become as “normal” as color, he or she reinvents it for his or her own use. Lee and Scorsese discuss the use of foreground and close-up, immersion and intense drama. Lee, for one, says he kept pulling his actors back. And Scorsese, a total convert to what he now considers to be the dominant new medium, makes it clear that he intends to shoot his future films in 3-D whenever he can. “There is something that 3-D gives to the picture that takes you into another land, and you stay there, and it’s a good place to be,” he says.
3-D seems right for a film as epic as Life of Pi, which features a ship in a violent storm, a zebra leaping into a lifeboat, Pi underwater watching his family sinki
ng into the depths, and Pi’s power struggles at sea with the tiger, not to mention a scene involving thousands of flying silver fish. Intimate drama, however, may not be the right place to use 3-D. In the right hands, 3-D works magic—Cameron spent $17 million to retrofit Titanic, and it looked superb. But I am not the only one skeptical of the CinemaCon footage of Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby, a movie that shows no signs of anyone pulling back. Sure enough, Warner Bros. later postpones the literary drama’s opening from the high-profile December 2012 award season to a more forgiving summer 2013 berth. (It’s a smart move; in that context, the film is decently reviewed and scores with audiences to the tune of $331 million worldwide without facing awards scrutiny. Remembering that theaters hang onto about half the gross, that’s still not enough to make back the more than $200 million in production and marketing costs from theatrical revenues.)
At Fox’s CinemaCon show-and-tell, the studio—just like everyone else—demonstrates it is surging full-steam ahead on 3-D movies, from Prometheus, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and The Wolverine to the animated Ice Age: Continental Drift and many more titles to follow.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. uses CinemaCon to introduce another technological advance via Peter Jackson’s new Lord of the Rings prequel The Hobbit, the first installment of a planned trilogy. The film was shot at the new super-fast rate of 48 frames per second (fps)—twice as fast as the standard 24. Digital cameras and projectors make this possible, although exhibitors need to enhance the software on their 3-D projectors to handle 48 fps, at about $10,000 per projector. The main boosters of this technology, Cameron and Jackson, promise that 48 fps—or faster—offers a crisp viewing experience, free of any motion artifacts such as image vibrating or juttering, shuddering, or other familiar 24 fps anomalies.
But exhibitors and media resist. Many say that the super-clear ten minutes of footage—especially the exterior sunlit scenes—look like lousy TV video. Later in July, at the fanboy convention Comic-Con in San Diego, Jackson admits that the bad reaction in Las Vegas convinced him not to present The Hobbit footage in 48 fps until he could show filmgoers the entire film in 3-D. Cameron had encountered similar resistance to early marketing shots of the blue aliens in Avatar, which only came to believable life within the 3-D world of the fictitious planet Pandora. At $237 million, Avatar was not only the most expensive but the highest-grossing film of all time (thanks to premium 3-D tickets), setting a high standard for 3-D films; Cameron had hoped to shoot his three sequels with a high frame rate. But The Hobbit at 48 fps never took off. As a concession to Jackson, Warner released The Hobbit on December 14 using the new format in just 450 theaters out of 4,000. The studio plans to release both Hobbit sequels (The Desolation of Smaug in 2013, There and Back Again in 2014) in at least some theaters in the new format.
Digital screen conversions took off between 2009 and 2010, when the number of global d-screens exploded from 16,000 to 36,000. Older projectionists were replaced by technicians who knew how to navigate the world of DVDs and Blu-rays, servers and Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs), delivered as conventional computer hard drives in plastic cases, or via satellite or fiber-optic broadband with protective time-limited decryption keys. Unfortunately, the new digital technology causes far more delays and problems, especially when used in high volume at time-sensitive film festivals, than old-fashioned mechanical projectors ever did—they were easily fixed. It’s still a shock, in any case, to see a projectionist at the Pacific Theatres at the Grove in Los Angeles start a film by punching an iPad.
“Simply put,” the NATO spokesman John Fithian tells lagging exhibitors at CinemaCon 2012, “if you don’t make the decision to get on the digital train soon, you will be making the decision to get out of the business.”
By and large the conversion process was completed by the biggest theater chains in time for the studios’ late 2012 deadline, when their financial aid to theaters would end. In fact, Twentieth Century Fox declared in a November letter to exhibitors that it would soon no longer supply 35-millimeter prints to theaters: “The date is fast approaching when 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight will adopt the digital format as the only format in which it will theatrically distribute its films . . . We strongly advise those exhibitors that have not yet done so to take immediate steps to convert their theaters to digital projection systems.”
While some indie distributors were still supplying a few 35-millimeter prints, as well as digital “prints,” to smaller indie art houses and mom-and-pop theaters, by 2012 the changeover to digital was pretty much complete. The recession has made it tough for small houses that can’t afford the changeover, and it has gotten harder for indie theaters to obtain 35-millimeter prints. Even overseas, digital has taken over in all but the poorest recession-hit countries. One last edge that 35 millimeter has over digital is in the area of film preservation. Many filmmakers try to sock away a 35-millimeter print of their films for safekeeping, as digital formats demand constant, expensive upgrading to the latest system.
While the theater chains are unified in their mission to hang onto moviegoers for dear life, the studios have their own conflicting agendas. They are well aware that they have many more distribution options than ever before: the global theatrical market is just the most crucial and potentially lucrative.
And the studios watched the music business lose its profit margins to rampant piracy, which was about consumers wanting to consume what they wanted when they wanted, for free, mostly. The music companies ignored for too long the signs of changing demand. It took Apple chief Steve Jobs to radically alter the economic model and devise a profitable way of selling music to buyers by the download.
Luckily for the Hollywood studios, digital piracy of feature films required far more bandwidth and was more difficult to accomplish—for a while. The question was, would the studios bend to consumer demand, giving them what they wanted, or hang on for dear life to their tried-and-true—and lucrative—ancillary windows, which required movie fans to either go to theaters or wait months for video on demand and DVD?
Here’s the old paradigm: premiere a movie in theaters, then make it available three or four months later at a high premium cost via VOD, then sell and rent DVDs, then show it on pay cable, and then make it available on broadcast television all over the world.
The theaters were happy because they were the sole venue for selling movies for three to four months. They wanted a space of time so that moviegoers wouldn’t think, “Oh, I’ll just wait for cable.” The studios were happy because they could collect revenues from every stream. But piracy was growing all over the world and eating into revenues, no matter how vigilant the fight against in-theater camcorders. Hence more studios started to favor opening films in theaters around the world ahead, or at the same time as North America, to cut that risk; 3-D was another hedge against copying.
Meanwhile, studio DVD revenues continued to plateau after the 2008 recession, when consumers stopped stocking their home video libraries. And Netflix somewhat clumsily began to encourage its customers to subscribe not only to rent DVDs via their signature returnable red envelopes, but to stream online as well. In 2012, Netflix changed the conversation entirely, competing with television directly by producing its own high-end programming. (In March 2013, after Netflix made available the entire season of David Fincher’s $60 million, thirteen-episode remake of the Brit series House of Cards—relocated to Washington, D.C., and starring Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, and Kate Mara—the company’s stock soared and subscription services like HBO, along with the mighty networks, faced increased consumer demand for binge-viewing, the ability to watch an entire season all at once.)
Consumers, thanks to such independent companies as Magnolia Pictures and IFC Films, both owned by cable operators, were getting used to being able to download and stream via Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, TiVo, Roku, Playstation 3, and Amazon. They could even watch premium subscription VOD on their local cable system weeks before a movie hit theaters.
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sp; THE $11 BILLION YEAR
Every year CinemaCon rolls out the $100 Million Reel; it’s a tradition to remind the exhibitors of the movies that scored in their theaters. The 2012 compilation that was shown in 2013 ran clips from the top-grossing films that totaled over $100 million domestically, from the animated originals Brave and Wreck-It Ralph and Spielberg’s biopic Lincoln to three franchise movies—The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Hunger Games—that broke the $400 million domestic barrier. Of the top twenty-six films of 2012, nineteen were based on some other property, eight were sequels, four were comic-book franchises, two were remakes, two were prequels, and seven were originals. (See charts at the back of the book.)
Among the $100 million gang, there was a wide range, with the PG-13 rating faring best, followed by PG. Sounding a familiar gong at CinemaCon 2013, NATO’s Fithian asks the studios to make “more family-friendly fare.” Eight of the $100 million films were R-rated. “Give more choices to all ages,” he says. One of the reasons 2012 broke records was because there were more G, PG, and PG-13 “spread over the calendar.”
Fithian cites Universal as a model for releasing films away from summer and holiday peak periods. The Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds original CIA thriller Safe House came out in February, Illumination’s animated Lorax in March, and Tony Gilroy’s rebooted franchise The Bourne Legacy in August. “Off months bring huge returns,” Fithian says. “Distribution in the off months produced higher returns than the holiday period.” He also begs for more films aimed at women and Hispanics, a growing frequent moviegoing segment, using as examples the Twilight series, Brave, and The Hunger Games.
The $11 Billion Year Page 9