Exhibition pt. I
When the courts decided that the majors practicing “forward vertical integration” was just fancy business speak for “Carnigie-esque monopoly” each had to choose whether they wanted to get rid of (a). production, (b). distribution, or (c). exhibition. Today much production is done under contract but when forced to, the wisest of the lot chose to dump exhibition. Leading to chaos, closures, and financial debacles for countless movie theaters.
The way we view movies has changed a great deal. In the course of my generation (Y/Millennials) we’ve seen wide spread embrace of video on demand, internet distribution, and all manner of new technologies. The Rio pmp 300 I purchased in 1998 may have only had a 32mb capacity but it played .mp3s and had the first digital music service provider (Rioport) paving the way for the many services we use today. BBS mutated into the internet, AOL installation discs are no longer mass mailed to every home in America, Netscape has died as a browser, but the movie theater remains. In what incarnation movie theaters pass on to our spawn descendants is only a matter of time.
I’m not sure how well the meglo-theater chains are doing. But judging from the price having gone up in St. Louis from 5.50 to on average 8.50 a ticket, and at latest glance here in LA about $11.50 they’ve abandoned the volume business model in favor of outright vampirism. Video stores are in even more dire straights (As perhaps dare I say video game stores may be in a few years?) with automated rental kiosks, direct post DVD subscriptions, and VoD all taking off.
For every teenager trying to use crutches, work a register and navigate a deluge of popcorn oil at some 18 screen temple to the concession stand (been there) exists a drive-in or independent theater that’s thriving.
Aside from using enough qualifiers to obfuscate the lack of statistics to back up my point I’ll provide an analysis of a few independent theaters in an upcoming post. Most likely I’ll cover the Moxie Cinema in Springfield Missouri, the MacRobert’s in Stirling Scotland, and the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin.
It’s relatively late at moment and it’s back to the resume mines for me in a few hours.
Juard Van Dijkhorst