Category Archives: The Mediascape

Cinema not dead, just bloated — Schrader

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As quoted in the Independent while talking about his new film Dog Eat Dog, Paul Schrader asserts:

“Don’t confuse the multiplexes with cinema. The multiplexes have run their course. That’s a 20th century phenomenon that has gone. But there is still obviously a lot of audio-visual entertainment – there’s a tsunami of product. You can’t really say cinema is dead. If anything, it is bloated and overpopulated at the moment. Cinema had a magical deal with capitalism for 100 years. If you’ll pay to see it, we’ll make it for you. Movies are now like painting, literature or music. What percentage of musicians make a living? Three or four per cent? We are now getting to that point where only maybe five per cent of filmmakers make a living.”

He continues:

“The reason I am doing press and going to festivals is to be number one VOD on our opening VOD weekend. If you can be the top VOD film at the (opening) weekend, then you make money. That’s where the economics of a film like Dog Eat Dog lie right now. You’re never going to make money theatrically.”

My take: It’s rather sobering to hear this from Paul Schrader, the man who wrote some of Martin Scorsese‘s best films, including Taxi Diver and Raging Bull. But it’s hard to argue with him that clicking on the top of a VOD queue hasn’t replaced queuing in line under a cinema marquee.

ourscreen does cinema-on-demand in the UK

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Stephen Follows in the UK has just posted an excellent analysis of cinema-on-demand in general and about ourscreen in particular.

Stephen’s main belief is that “the emergence of online tools empower audiences to communicate and organize.”

About ourscreen:

“ourscreen empowers film fans and local communities to create and attend screenings at their local cinema. ourscreen is where film fans can control their local cinema. In three easy steps (pick a film – decide where and when – share your screening), we are all able to create film screenings for our friends or anybody who wants to come. If enough people book tickets the screening happens. This is people-powered cinema. ourscreen offers a quick and easy way to make the cinema yours, whether you are a film fan, a school group, a local business or anyone who wants to enjoy a great film in an amazing cinema.”

Stephen includes three case studies that reveal actual performance numbers. ourscreen claims their overall screen average is £621 or roughly $1040 CAD.

My take: I’m glad to see there are multiple firms in the cinema-on-demand business in both the UK and the US. What I really want to see is someone start this up in Canada.

The Future of Cinema is — TV

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Can feature films still claim to be the pinnacle of cultural expression?

Perhaps, but not as once enjoyed in movie palaces. Today, the point of consumption is a much smaller, private, screen, in the living room or the pocket.

No one doubts that movies are big business. The Ringer notes:

“According to Box Office Mojo, 704 movies — the most ever — were released last year that grossed at least some money in theaters. (The lowest, Confession of a Child of the Century, drew $74 in limited release.) The American theatrical movie industry raked in an extraordinary $11 billion at the box office, more than any other year. But that data point is misleading because it did so with the third-fewest tickets sold in the past 20 years, against the highest average ticket price in history ($8.43) and the highest number of releases. This includes the accounting for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which, with a lifetime gross of $937 million, is the biggest domestic release in movie history by more than $175 million.”

Entertainment conglomerates are in business of filmed entertainment, not cinema art.

Therefore, as quoted in the same article, Bret Easton Ellis predicts:

“There will not be another Coppola. There will not be another Spielberg. There will not be another Scorsese. There will not be another Altman. Because the melding of that kind of artistic mind with a cultural experience, which was going to the movies and watching a large-scale film on a giant screen that’s not IMAX that isn’t a Marvel movie, is over. It’s shifted to television, and that basically now what we’re going to get on television, is someone trying to recapture the glory of 20th-century cinema on TV.”

My take: If Ellis is right, we find ourselves in a lamentable situation. When I was growing up, there was no question, cinema far exceeded television as a medium for artistic expression. TV was where movies went to the panned, scanned and injected with commercials. It’s almost as if they’ve traded places.

Netflix raises $1 Billion for new content

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Further to my post last week, Variety reports that Netflix is raising one billion dollars to finance its new content.

“Netflix said it is raising $1 billion through a new debt offering, bringing its long-term debt load to more than $3 billion. The offering was upsized from an aggregate principal amount of $800 million originally announced Monday morning.”

It’s a good thing subscribers seem to prefer its original content. AllFlicks claims:

“Netflix user ratings show that Netflix’s subscriber base prefers Netflix’s original content to its syndicated content. Netflix originals sport an average rating of 3.85 stars out of five; all other content averages 3.47 stars. That means that user ratings for Netflix originals are 11% higher, on average, than user ratings for syndicated content. Netflix does best in the documentaries category, where users rate non-original content, on average, at 3.54. Netflix’s documentaries average 4.07 stars, a pretty impressive showing. Netflix’s TV shows do the worst, but still edge their other TV show content by 5.7%.”

Polygon reports that CEO Ted Sarandos says:

“The company wants to move to having about 50 percent of its catalog being original content… but according to recent reports, Netflix’s library has actually shrunk by 50 percent in the past four years.”

Gizmodo corroborates:

“Netflix’s content library isn’t just getting smaller, it’s also increasingly losing its best movies. The Streaming Observer did some analysis, and found that only 31 movies from the IMDb Top 250 are currently available on Netflix…. Even worse than the paltry selection of movies, it’s noteworthy that this figure is actually down 12 percent from 2014, when a Reddit user documented the 49 available films from the IMDb Top 250 then available on Netflix.”

My take: it seems somewhat disingenuous of Netflix to say its content is 50% original if it’s also reducing the number of films on the service. The analogy is crude, but it’s the difference between peeing in the kiddie pool and peeing in the big pool; the concentration of the same amount of pee is higher in the smaller pool.

Netflix continues to expand

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Netflix continues its expansive plans.

BuzzFeed reports the SVOD (subscription video-on-demand) giant will spend $6 billion on content this year, in the process creating 1,000 hours of original shows.

Meanwhile Esquire reports that the streaming service has made a deal with iPic Cinemas of New York and Los Angeles to screen 10 of their original motion pictures in their theatres, on the same day the flicks debut online. Speculation is that Netflix wants to take home an Oscar, to join their many Emmy award wins, because to be eligible a film must have played at least one week in both cities.

Meanwhile, some filmmakers are turning their backs on Hollywood and making multiple-picture deals with Netflix instead. For instance, IndieWire reports that Mark Duplass‘s “latest film, the romantic drama ‘Blue Jay,’ was financed by Netflix without the company even seeing a script. Instead, Duplass wrote a 10-page outline that allowed for significant improvisation during shooting.”

My take: I wonder how big Netflix needs to get before U.S. antitrust concerns arise. It was less than 70 years ago when the Paramount Decision decreed that vertically-integrated movie studios needed to divest their theatres, as this had created an oligopoly.

Demand.film launches cinema-on-demand service

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The cinema-on-demand space is about to expand.

Joining Tugg and Gathr is new-comer Demand.film.

According to Forbes:

“The three Australian entrepreneurs who created the platform say their dual aims are to enable filmmakers from around the world to reach audiences who would not otherwise get the chance to see their works, and to supplement traditional theatrical distribution.”

They are also disrupting film exhibition accounting and reporting:

“Demand.film is the first crowdfunding cinema service to use blockchain technology to create databases which record high-level, scalable sales information that can’t be changed. ‘The advantages that gives us are transparency and trust with producers, distributors and exhibitors, which will be transformational in the accounting side of the business,’ says David Doepel, the firm’s managing director.”

According to Startup Daily:

“The platform uses blockchain technology to enable independent filmmakers to negotiate a multi-country release in one single deal. While the Demand.film team are being tight lipped on the features of the new platform, Doepel said that the upgraded functionality has been specifically designed with audiences and cinema in mind. Vice president of operations and development for Demand.film Barbara Connell further explained, ‘We’re incorporating some fantastic fintech, which includes Blockchain technology. This will be complemented by new dashboards that can be married to social media campaigns and other social media activity. While this all seems very complicated, the platform has been designed to be very easy to use and to be nimble.'”

Demand.film also operates in New Zealand and the United Kingdom and plans to expand to other countries and North America in 2017.

My take: come to Canada, please! There is so much under-utilized capacity in movie theatres, particularly outside of busy Friday and Saturday nights. How many times have you gone to a matinee only to find merely a dozen or so  fellow patrons sitting in the dark? I would definitely become an impresario once again because the cinema-on-demand model assures a win-win-win-win screening for the filmmaker, the audience, the theatre and the organizer.

CMF releases Discoverability report

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Trends by the Canada Media Fund has released the second part of its research into Discoverability and discovered that Canadian viewers are both aspirational and inspirational:

“All they are looking for is to be happy, have the best day possible and — ultimately — be validated and inspire their friends. In a nutshell, they are seeking to live a fulfilling experience.”

Other takeaways, quoting liberally:

  • The more audiences are offered the convenience of on-demand content and a varied range of content to choose, the more they watch content online. [Duh.]
  • 59% of Canadian TV viewers aged 18+ say they discover new TV content through recommendations from friends. [Witness the Rise of Social Media.]
  • It’s the X, Y and Z generations (the 18 to 49-year-olds) that not surprisingly rely on their friends for discovery, whereas boomers rely more on TV and radio commercials. [True, but keep in mind the oldest Gen-X’ers are 56 now and the youngest Gen-Z’ers are not yet teenagers.]
  • Being a viewer, or a consumer of content, is much more multifaceted than sitting back and having content just ‘wash’ over you. The state of ‘audience-ness’ is now dynamic, participatory, cross-channel, and both synchronous (in real time) and asynchronous. [Welcome to the Matrix.]

Read the complete PDF.

My take: Word-of-mouth still rules! Only now, you might ‘hear’ it online first — and your friend might live on another continent rather than around the corner.

The quickest way to identify your film audience

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I see indie filmmakers make their movies and then begin figuring out how to monetize them, i.e. finding a paying audience. (Mea culpa; that’s what we did with Recorded: Live!)

Or, better, they put together a project and at the planning stage, devise a marketing strategy. Part of this will be determining their ideal audience. Too many say ‘Everyone’ will want to see their movie. (Yeah, I’ve thought this too.)

Now, an indie filmmaker half-way around the world enlightens me.

Rihaan Patel slashes the ’10 steps to your audience’, etc., to one simple principle. Writing in a learned language, he offers in
This one is for Innocent Independent Filmmaker who make awesome film but don’t know what happens next!:

“But how to find your potential audience? Just look at the protagonist of your film. And Your protagonist is personification of your audience.”

Simple! He continues:

“Find people who shares quality of your protagonist and share your marketing message. It will connect them.”

Of course! This is a solid strategy that should allow any film to earn its production budget. Ron Mann did this with the DVD Tales of the Rat Fink, which he targeted to hot-rodders. All word of mouth, media coverage and critical reviews just expand the audience beyond the core, and generate your profit.

My take: this is brilliant! ‘Your protagonist is the personification of your audience’ is a great place to start when defining your audience. Literally, then figuratively, and finally metaphorically. (On a recent project, we came close to this, using setting to determine that our audience was small-town Canada — but perhaps we needed to focus in on our heroine and the women and people she represented.) When the ‘Patel Postulate’ really becomes powerful is when you flip it on its head, writing your movie using its audience to personify the protagonist. For instance, it makes no sense for the homeless guy to be the protagonist in my rom-com; homeless guys don’t buy many movie tickets. Rather, a better protagonist would be the earnest woman who befriends him.

 

CanCon-sultations

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The Department of Canadian Heritage has launched consultations on how to strengthen the creation, discovery and export of Canadian content in a digital world.

Minister Mélanie Joly proclaims:

“As a government, we are proud to support Canadian culture. But we want to do it well. We’re launching a national dialogue on Canadian content; one that will help us adapt our cultural policies to today’s digital realities. Tell us what’s important to you. Share your ideas to help Canada thrive in a digital world. And to allow people across the country and around the world to keep discovering what makes our culture and creators so great.”

At stake is billions dollars that Heritage Canada uses to fund culture in Canada. Its portfolio includes things like the CBC, the NFB, Telefilm Canada, the Canada Council and the CRTC, among many others.

The consultations stem from an April announcement when Joly told The Globe and Mail: “Everything is on the table.”

There are many ways to take part:

  1. You can post your idea.
  2. You can post your public event.
  3. You can upload a submission.
  4. You can host your own event.

See the results of the pre-consultations and the expert advisory group.

My take: kudos to Minister Joly for showing some leadership on media, arts and culture in a digital age. Discoverability and monetization are the two biggest issues facing all artists, Canadian or otherwise, on the web. Time will tell if this consultation results in mere ripples in the pond or a massive tidal wave of change. (I used to be a part-owner of Tidal Wave Productions.) My advice: get involved if you want to see the status quo challenged!

So bad, it’s good — vindicated!

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Keyvan Sarkhosh and Winfried Menninghaus of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics have legitimized your cinematic guilty pleasures.

Their study, “Enjoying trash films: Underlying features, viewing stances, and experiential response dimensions”, published in Poetics 57, is the first scholarly study of otherwise unredeemable movies.

For instance, in discussing Sharknado, they say:

“Apart from flying sharks, blood and guts are the main ingredients of this surprise trash hit. At first glance it seems paradoxical that someone should deliberately watch badly made, embarrassing and sometimes even disturbing films, and take pleasure in them. To such viewers, trash films appear as an interesting and welcome deviation from the mainstream fare. We are dealing here with an audience with above-average education, which one could describe as ‘cultural omnivores’. Such viewers are interested in a broad spectrum of art and media across the traditional boundaries of high and popular culture.”

My take: Sometimes you just have to see a bad movie to put the better ones into perspective.