Lack of Digital Screens for Attack of the Clones

spt writes: "CNN Entertainment has an article describing Lucas Arts' disappointment at the lack of digital screens available for Attack of the Clones. When the Phantom Menace was released, they were hoping that, by May 2002, there would be 2000 digital screens. That estimate dropped to 'several hundred', but the reality is that now there are only 20 digital screen in the U.S. Who has been lucky enough to see a digitally produced film in one of these 20? Is there enough of a benefit to think that more screens will be converted to digital projection?"

Comments

What's the advantage?

[-tji]

I know there are advantages for the film producer in doing all digital. Editing, and special effects are easier in an all digital medium.

Digital may also (theoretically) solve distribution problems, allowing them to download the films to the theaters, rather than shipping the physical films around.

But, what is the benefit to the theater or the viewer?

I believe that Lucas is doing Star Wars in 1080p24 (1080 lines, progressive scanned at 24 frames per second). A good 35mm film will offer much better resolution than that.

Wouldn't a better option for quality be 70mm, like Imax uses. Or, even cranking up the frame rate.. how about a 60fps film. The motion blur at 24fps is horrible.

Digital Cinema is a Disruptive Technology

[epepke]

History has shown that disruptive technologies (GUI, small disk drives, flash cards, etc.) have followed this path:

1. They are developed by large corporations, are initially less cost-effective, but have certain peculiar advantages
2. The large companies have absolutely no clue how to market them, and they rot
3. They are taken up by smaller companies and find success in niche markets
4. Gradually, the technology improves to the point where is is better and cheaper than the old technologies
5. Large companies suddenly notice them again, and they become standard

Digital film is a classical example of a disruptive technology at stage 2. It won't take off until it is adopted in niche markets.

I suggest for the niche market something I thought of a few years ago for HDTV: small "art" film houses, the ones that now aren't above using projection of standard video at a pinch, who make most of their money from selling beer and espresso, and have small but dedicated clientele. Set up a distribution system where a small theatre can lease such a system and download films. Offer a variety of older films in digital form (possibly scanned from prints but ideally from interpositives). This would provide a nice, steady stream of revenue for older films that were not blockbusters but which will always have a steady market amongst the people who go for this sort of thing.

It is probably too small a market for the studios to notice, so some small entity is going to have to negotiate with studios to provide this service.

As this happens, companies will be able to work to improve the technology, eventually getting it to the point where most of the (currently legitimate) objections will not apply.

edge out the competition...

[WinPimp2K]

Bah humbug! (Bear with me while I pull numbers out of thin air and further pretend you are a theater operator)

More specifically, the new digital projector will cost upwards of 100 grand. Your theater seats 300 people, and you generally sell 1000 tickets per day. (five showings at 200 people per - you are doing good!) And you aren't going to be able to sell off the old projector - not everything is available digitally, and when it is all digital who the heck will buy your old film projector for anything near what it actually costs?

Now, pretend that you will actually get 5% more people coming for the "improved digital" experience. Well, that is an additional 50 people per day. But your box office basically goes to the distributor/studio (400.00 extra per day,but not to the theater). So you get 5 bucks per person on the concession stand - or an extra 250 bucks per day. Gee that would almost pay for the upgrade in a year -if you can count on that five bucks per extra person at the concession stand. On the other hand, the studio gets an extra 400 bucks per day from the box office (over a hundred grand per year), but it actually saves them a few thousand in the costs of actual films that they do not have to make and distrbute.

Oh, but wait - you don't have just one screen, you a new stadium seating multiplex with 2 dozen screens. And you are still paying off the debt you took on constructing that to get ahead of the competition, plus you are hurting because of the long term leases on the mall multiplexes you cannibalized when you put up the new stadium seating facility.

And having learned some hard lessons from the stadium seating construcion glut, you know that if you do upgrade to digital and start seeing slightly better numbers, well, then your competitors (who lost that extra 50 tickets per day per screen) are going to be forced into upgrading aswell - if they can afford to. If they can't afford to, they will take other steps to remain competitive - maybe cutting their ticket prices. You can pretty much be guaranteed that you won't see those extra customers long enough to recover your investment in a new projector.

But wait, we aren't even talking about a single multiplex! You are actually part of a national chain, and theses decisions are made at a regional level (the manager at McDonalds does not decide what gos on his menu either). So rather than a decision involving a dozen screens, and a couple of million bucks, we are talking hundreds of screens and real money. All so we won't disappoint George Lucas - the prima donna snob whose ideas of "fair play" kept us from running Episode 1 on most of our screens for the first few days to milk maximum revenue, and then cut back to handle just the die hard fans who put down "Jedi" as their religion on census forms.

No, theater operators actually have a strong financial DIS-incentive to "go digital". Their demands that the studios subbsidize it make a heck of a lot of sense - the studios will see all the major cost savings on the digital distribution over physical media, but there won't be any overall change in the actual numbers of tickets sold or buckets of popcorn purchased - hence no advantage for the theater.