Why the magic of cinema will always trump Netflix
IN THE AGE OF STREAMING TV, THERE ARE FEARS THAT GOING TO THE MOVIES COULD BECOME A THING OF THE PAST. BUT AS RUSSELL LEADBETTER DISCOVERS TO HIS SURPRISE, CINEMA SEEMS TO BE GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH...
WITH the Oscars just a week away, the question on the lips of everyone in the movie industry is this: Can cinema survive in the age of Netflix, Amazon Prime and streaming TV? Why would you drag yourself out of your comfy living room, away from the box set and your glass of wine, and drive to some soulless barn on the edge of town where a family of four can spend the guts of £100 on tickets, drink, hotdogs, popcorn and parking.
For those imagining a world of boarded-up cineplexes filled with tumbleweed, don’t fret too much. We’ve been here many times before – and Armageddon has never arrived. In fact, cinema today might just be stronger than ever.
Back in 1962, John Spraos wrote a book entitled The Decline Of The Cinema. In it, the political economist detailed the “cataclysmic” fall in cinema audiences in the previous decade – a decline caused largely by the expansion of television.
The squat, ungainly box in the corner of people’s living rooms had a huge impact on cinema-going numbers, but in time studios and cinema chains fought to reclaim lost ground, offering bigger and better films, and investing huge sums on building multiplexes, and, later, on digitisation and new technologies such as immersive sound.
But even though cinema audiences have now, in the words of the UK Cinema Association, been strong for 25 years, a multiplicity of threats hangs over the movie-house.
Video on Demand (VoD), available via such providers as Amazon Prime, Netflix, iTunes, BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema, Mubi and Now TV, enables you to stream films direct to your devices, so that you can watch them at home, on the bus, in the bath, in the park – wherever you want, whenever you want. Recent films such as 45 Years (which starred Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay) and Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie were streamed on the same day as they were released to cinemas – which many took as a hint that cinemas’ card was marked. And even if you miss a new film in the cinemas, you don’t have to wait too long to catch it on DVD – the gap between cinema release and DVD release has become noticeably smaller over the last few years. Recently, US website Bloomberg reported that Hollywood studios “looking to spark stale movie viewing” were considering offering fans high-priced home rentals of new films just two weeks after they debuted in cinemas. Piracy of films is another key issue. Last month, Torrent Freak, which monitors copyright, privacy and filesharing, reported that the superhero film Deadpool had been the most pirated movie of the year from torrent websites, which uses the Bit Torrent technology to distribute files over the internet. Others in its list included Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Finding Dory and The Revenant. Financial losses from piracy to UK cinemas in 2011 were around £216 million, or 21 per cent of annual box office. And yet … given all of this, it seems we still cannot shake the cinema-going habit. UK box offices recorded an all-time high of £1.2bn in 2015 thanks to a slate of must-see films that included Spectre, Jurassic World, Inside Out and Fifty Shades Of Grey, but also to what the UK Cinema Association refers to as “a period of unprecedented ongoing investment in the cinema experience by UK operators”.
Last year, total revenues were 0.8 per cent up on 2015’s, with 10 films each earning more than £35 million – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Bridget Jones’s Baby and Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice among them.
Don’t be surprised if 2017 tops even that. Damien Chazelle’s upbeat musical La La Land, beneficiary of 14 Oscar nominations, took £1.8m at the UK box office over February 3 to 5 to increase its cumulative take to £24.5m. That same weekend T2 Trainspotting raked in £2.9m (current total £10.6m). This year’s slate of crowd-pleasing films also includes Kong: Skull Island, Star Wars: Episode VIII and Alien: Covenant, all of which can safely be expected to do excellent business at the box office.
But with all the pressures crowding in on cinema, might our century-plus habit of watching movies on big screens go the way of the horse and carriage? This is a theory referenced in the introduction to the new Glasgow Film Festival programme.
The doomsayers, write festival co-directors Allan Hunter and Allison Gardner, believe we might go to the cinema for the spectacle of a comic-book blockbuster, watched on an IMAX screen from a seat that rumbles in time to the action – but, otherwise, forget it.
“Well, not on our watch,” add Hunter and Gardner. “You can consume what you choose on your mobile devices or Netflix subscription, but nothing will ever replace the magic of cinema.”
Before we look at the issue in depth, it’s as well to look back at our infatuation with the cinema. Allen Eyles’s excellent summary on BFI online tells the story well. The nitrate film stock in use in the earliest days was highly flammable and regulations came into force in January 1910 to bring about fire-resistant projection booths. This, says Eyles, greatly encouraged the spread of purpose-built picture houses, usually with flamboyant exteriors and with
I think it always comes back to that communal, emotional experience that people get by seeing a film, together, on a big screen
pay boxes open to the street.
By the time war broke out in 1914 almost every town had a permanent picture house, but many were fated to become “fleapits” unless they were rebuilt or enlarged.
Cinema chains gradually came into being around this time, like the Odeon (actually an acronym named after the founder – Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation). After the war, writes Eyles, feature-length films took over from short films and huge new picture palaces, influenced by American trends, began to proliferate in key cities.
Glasgow had the largest cinema in Britain – Green’s Playhouse, which opened in 1927 and could seat 4,254 people. (In 1973 it became the Apollo theatre – the imposing old building has long since gone, but on part of its site today stands Cineworld Glasgow, the world’s tallest cinema).
In the 1930s, says Eyles, ABC, Gaumont and Odeon between them owned a fifth of British cinemas and controlled the release of mainstream films in Britain “through their large cinemas in the major cities and through the selection of the weekly release to be shown throughout each circuit. This was usually a double bill of main feature and ‘B’ feature”.
Children’s Saturday-morning shows (a phenomenon that older readers will recall from their own childhoods) were also established during the 1930s.
Cinemas survived the vicissitudes of war in the 1940s, and 1946 witnessed the highest-ever total attendance: 1.6 billion a year. But a gradual decline followed up to the mid-1950s, caused mostly by the growth in popularity of TV sets in the home.
In his book Spraos wrote of that “cataclysmic decline” in British cinema’s fortunes over the previous decade: “In 1950, the ‘captive audience’ amounted to nearly 30 million each week and there were some 4,500 cinemas in commercial operation. At the end of 1960 only just over 3,000 cinemas were still functioning and American film output, upon which British cinemas had come greatly to rely, had dropped to half the level of 10 years earlier.”
Spraos noted an attitude that was prevalent in the cinema industry – to allow cheap, suburban and village cinemas to disappear, while adding luxury and comfort to the city-based ones that remained, making them fit for long runs and countering TV’s popularity by turning film-going from a routine entertainment into an occasion, at a cost “appropriate”.
Cinema attendances took a long time to recover. The Film Distributors’ Association website gives the annual figures between 1935 and 2012. The totals fell steadily: 500 million in 1960, 193 million in 1970, 101 million in 1980. The year 1985 was the real low-point, down to just 72 million. Thereafter, the figures start to climb again.
Hollywood had by then discovered the blockbuster, starting with Jaws, in 1975. One critic noted that Steven Spielberg’s film’s success was synonymous with the idea of ‘wide openings’ – releasing films nationwide rather than in just a few cities. Lew Wasserman, the chairman of the Universal studio, reduced the number of US theatres that Jaws played in, thus forcing people to get in their cars and head for a theatre that happened to be screening it.
Cinemas have gradually evolved, too. Multiplexes have long been a common sight. Much attention has been lavished on improving facilities. Cineworld’s Superscreens feature wall-to-wall screens that reach the ceiling, “dual projectors giving a brighter 3D experience and breathtaking multi-dimensional sound with Dolby Atmos speakers”.
Smaller cinemas like the Glasgow Film Theatre offer a “boutique” experience. The GFT itself welcomed 198,000 audience members to 676 films in 201516, and it also has a VoD service, the GFT Player.
So what is the picture like now? Does Allan Hunter at GFF think that cinema-going will disappear, much like horses and carriages? No, is the answer.
“I think it always comes back to that communal, emotional experience that people get by seeing a film, together, on a big screen,” he tells me. “It also has something to do with concentration. You’re going somewhere and giving up a couple of hours of your time, and you’re focusing completely on that.
“Whereas, if you’re sitting at home, watching something on telly, you might flick through one of your devices. In the cinema, you concentrate on nothing but the film. That is what makes it slightly more special for people.
“Also, it’s a different film in the cinema. If you’re watching La La Land, for instance, on a big screen, with great sound and with everyone else enjoying the experience – the joy of it, the heartbreak of it, the amazing musical numbers – that makes it very different from watching it on DVD at home.”
He adds: “If you look at the big box office hits from last year you’ll see that one of the top three was Bridget Jones’s Baby. I’m sure a lot of that success was down to people going to see it together, people having the experience of a comedy that has ripples of laughter through an audience, and again that would be a very different film when you’re watch- ing it on DVD in three months’ time.”
Fifty Shades Of Grey drew lots of couples and became a standard girls’ night out, too. The AbFab movie was also one for the girls, Hunter observes.
“A lot of cinemas did a roaring trade in small bottles of Bolly. There were groups of women, all dressed to the nines and having a good time.”
Films come alive in the cinema, then, it seems – but does the same rule apply to older movies, films that have long been available to watch on TV or DVD? It seems so.
Hunter recalls last year’s GFF screening of Pillow Talk, the 1959 romcom starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. The screening attracted a full house and at the end people stood and applauded. Afterwards many remarked they had the film at home but that it just wasn’t the same as watching it with like-minded people on a big screen and pin-sharp projection.
Hunter acknowledges the external threats that cinema has had to endure.
“There have been waves, when people thought TV would destroy cinema, and cinema fights back with 3D, bigger screens, or colour. Then it was DVDs and Blu-rays. There have been various [developments] that foretell the end of cinema, but it always survives.”
Even the assertion that people will only go to cinemas just for CGI-laden superhero movies does not hold up, he believes, when you consider the success in cinemas of such films as Bridget Jones and La La Land – films “that have a big emotional connection for people. We will always want that”.
Cinemas have upped their game, then, but interestingly Hunter believes that VoD will continue its rise.
“I think we’re going to get to the stage of films being released on all platforms at the same time. A film would open in cinemas, on, say, Curzon Player, and maybe on Blu-ray and DVD on exactly the same day, so those who want the big-cinema experience can get that and the rest won’t have to wait three or six months for a DVD.” Glasgow Film Festival runs till February 26. www.glasgowfilm.org /glasgow-film-festival