Things don’t seem to be heading towards a resolution with the Writer’s strike any time soon, and frankly, I don’t expect them to. The studios (which, let’s remember, are all owned by larger corporations now) have a couple of good reasons to hold firm.
First, the movie/TV business is barely profitable as it is, and all signs indicate that the current paradigm is due for a collapse. Audience numbers continues to decrease for both feature films and TV shows at the same time that production costs continue to skyrocket. For every giant hit that earns a studio hundreds of millions of dollars (and those are rarer than people think, given the other sharers of the fiscal pie), there are dozens that lose money.
Things have been kept afloat the last ten years by DVD sales (which generated more income even in gross terms than actual box office receipts), but those are slowing, and I’m not sure we’ll see a new replacement technology any time soon. DVD represented an obviously huge leap forward over VHS, enough that people were willing to rebuild their film collections, just as CDs supplanted cassette tapes. However, the lack of consumer excitement over Blue Ray DVDs indicates that people just don’t see the new format as superior enough to bother replacing their regular DVDs all over again.
In fact, I don’t expect DVDs to really be replaced by another physical format. Instead, just as iPods and such have largely replaced CDs, I expect that video downloads will at some point replace DVDs. A physical medium like DVDs will still exist, probably (or something else after it), but it will be considered more of a specialty market.
The effect of all this will be to make the film and TV business as currently oriented even rockier. To me, this series of strikes will only serve to speed up that process. That’s true even if the writers’ union holds firm and continue their strike at length (thus alienating audiences who hold a decreasing amount of loyalty to movies and TV anyway), or if the studios give in (making the business more unprofitable for the production companies and forcing change in that direction).
Second, and more important, the Directors and Actors’ guilds are waiting in the wing with their own strikes. So if the studios cave in to the writers, they will also have to give up more to the other guilds. This again should cause the studios to take a hard line.
[Of course, one solution would be for the unions to agree to small baseline salaries, and then have the talent also share the financial pain if the films and shows are unprofitable. Meanwhile, the studios would have to share more money from successful films and shows, and more importantly, really throw their books open for the first time to allow for a fair examination of how much money and hopefully profit was actually generated by each work. The problem is, never the unions nor the studios would agree to this in a million years.]In any case, assuming (which may not be the case) that the strikes drag out and still the production pipelines for another year or so—which is possible—I wonder which studio will be the first in a major way to start offering a wide array of classic movies to theater owners. Obviously there’d be less box office generated, but then costs would be puny, and it would keep at least some people going to theaters.
Moreover, you could offer the cream of Hollywood filmmaking over the last seventy years, and if smart, charge half of what it costs to see a modern movie. A lot of families might well be willing to pay three or four bucks a ticket to see, say, The Sound of Music in theaters again. And theater owners, who make the bulk of their money from concession sales, would be glad I’d think to have people coming in the door, even at lower ticket prices.
Frankly, as we move to digital projection, we may be seeing more of this anyway. Disney has always made lots of extra money by releasing their classic films to theaters over and over again, and continues to do so with their now yearly 3-D release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which has generated $23 million in ticket sales the last two years. Now that the investment in converting the film to 3-D has been made, it’s going to be pretty much pure profit from here on out.
Maybe entire theaters would go in this direction, just as there used to be first and second run venues. Maybe somebody out there will make a fortune by starting such a theater chain up. Or perhaps existing and future multiplexes might reserve 10% of their screens for older movies while still showcasing current fare on the other screens.
I’d love to see this happen. And who knows, maybe it will.
