By the 1960s, movie theater attendances had dropped super-low because people preferred TV, which they didn’t have to pay for. The studios combatted this with lots of gimmicks to try to convince audiences to leave their TV and go to the movies. These gimmicks include: widescreen, extreme widescreen (Cinerama, 70mm Todd AO, etc), 3D, smell-o-vision, actors planted as audience members, and more. This is also when the studios finally fully embraced color (TV was black and white at the time). During this era, major studios RKO went out of business and MGM all but died as well.

Today, movie theater attendance in North America has dropped to its lowest levels in decades, a primary reason being people don’t feel the need to leave their streaming services. And the studios have once again been combatting this with lots of gimmicks, including: 3D, IMAX, rumble-chairs, luxury seats, alcohol screenings, and more. As for the major studios, Fox is gone and both Paramount and Sony/Columbia are struggling to hold on.

The studios survived television and they will also survive streaming. With television, the studios survived due to a demographic shift: 1967 releases “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate” (“Bonnie and Clyde” especially) used French instead of Hollywood techniques to target younger liberal audiences, not conservative families like Hollywood was targeting before. After the success of these films, Hollywood stopped trying to recreate “Sound of Music”, “Ten Commandments”, “Ben Hur”, etc, and instead moved onto films like “Easy Rider”, “The Exorcist”, “The Godfather”, and more.

Today, we’re in the midst of a similar transition, although it’s difficult to see when you’re in the middle of it. Also, despite the struggle against streaming, Disney is doing exceptionally well and Universal and Warner Brothers are doing well too. They’ve done this by effectively turning movies episodic, each release of Marvel/DCEU/Star Wars/Fast and Furious/etc equivalent to a new TV episode, while streaming, with its high quality and binge-watching nature, has transitioned television from episodic to more cinematic in nature. So perhaps today’s transition is movies becoming episodic and TV becoming cinematic?

Or maybe the transition is different. The popularity of “American Sniper” seemed similar to the popularity of “Bonnie and Clyde”, the former connecting with conservative audiences at a time when everything Hollywood was making was liberal, the latter connecting with liberal audiences at a time when everything Hollywood was making was conservative.

But the industry subsequent to these films didn’t follow suit: at the time of “Bonnie and Clyde”, Hollywood was filled with box office bombs (“Cleopatra”, “Dr Dolittle”, “Fall of the Roman Empire”, and more) and at the time of “American Sniper”, Hollywood was also filled with bombs (“John Carter”, “Lone Ranger”, “Pan”, “47 Ronin”) but for the latter instead of shifting demographics, Hollywood figured out how to make big budget movies that don’t bomb. They did this by going episodic, as described above.

Also, Hollywood’s recent remakes of classic 1950s/1960s films have mostly been unsuccessful (“Exodus”, “Ben Hur”, “Magnificent Seven”, “Dr Dolittle”), further indicating that even though “American Sniper’s” appeal was opposite “Bonnie and Clyde”, a reverse of “Bonnie and Clyde’s” influence does not seem to be what filmgoers are looking for.

So, is going episodic Hollywood’s major shift, as hits like the MCU, “Star Wars VII”, “Jurassic World”, “Fast and Furious”, etc seem to indicate? Or did going episodic simply delay the shift, as bombs like “Solo”, “Dark Phoenix”, “Blade Runner 2049”, “Justice League”, and others may be revealing? If the latter, will the shift be inspired by “American Sniper”, another similar type film, or something else entirely?

The answer to the previous paragraph’s questions I think will be the ultimate answer to how we will view Hollywood today twenty years from now. And whatever the answer is, we will definitely look back at this era as one of the greatest transitional periods in Hollywood history, up there with the late 1920s/early 1930s (transition to sound) and the late 1960s/early 1970s, as described above.

This article originally appeared in a different format on Quora. 

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Celluloid Junkie was launched at a time when the digital cinema conversion, though underway, was struggling to gain traction.  We were still two years off from “Avatar” which gave cinemas a digital and 3D adrenaline boost. We knew that everything would soon be digital, so rather than a name like Digital Cinema Digest we opted for something tongue-in-cheek and memorable-ish. Besides, most of the obvious domain names had already been taken.

Our first two posts proved prescient in hindsight in terms of topics chosen. Sperling wrote about the trailer for the first “Iron Man” film playing during “The Daily Show”. A decade later the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become the biggest force in today’s multiplex business. The same day Patrick wrote about the appointment of Phil Clapp to head the UK Cinema Association. (Since he is still around, we suppose it is only fair to wish him a happy anniversary too.) Mr. Clapp went on to become President of UNIC as well and has played a major role in shaping the cinema industries in the United Kindom and European Union.

While one of Celluloid Junkie’s co-founders went off to work for The Hollywood Reporter (you are missed, Carolyn Giardina) and Patrick got sidetracked helping to digitize Bollywood for Adlabs/Reliance, Sperling kept the site alive for most of the first few years. When the time came to re-launch the site it proved a major effort. We didn’t just need a new logo and look (goodbye popcorn box, hello ticket stub), but sites now had to be optimised for smartphones.  To put this in perspective, we we weren’t being indexed by Google to show up in searches at this point. We managed our redesign and relaunch by bootstrapping, because we knew what we wanted, even if it would take longer for us to finance it ourselves. (Special shout-out here to Ben Lew, our web wizard and graphics designer).

While we are not quite finished with the site, and indeed may never be, we are proud of what it has become: a resource for the global cinema industry. Not satisfied with just being a “blog” we launched a press releases section CJ Wire over a year ago. We were tired of doing stories that were just re-writes of press releases.  Besides, why not read the original for yourself, instead of seeing how we chop and re-arrange the quotes? If there is something we can provide additional analysis to then we do, but we don’t believe in “churnalism“. To-date we have had over 500 press releases posted to CJ Wire and it is the second or third most visited section of CJ in any month, with 80% of visitors sticking around to read more than one post.

We are privileged to have been joined this year by Jim Amos, whose box office analysis and accurate predictions get each week off to a roaring start. We have also had countless contributions from the likes of Charles ‘CJ’ Flynn and too many other people for us to thank them all here. Above all, we learn by talking to smart people in the cinema industry who give us their time and insights for us to share. We will be growing the editorial team further in the coming months and years to expand our coverage. There is so much more for us to do in cinema retail, seating, social media, distribution, market, etc.

We are also grateful to our first two industry partners Vista Cinema and the Coca-Cola Company. We held off accepting advertising and sponsorships for years, even when companies came knocking on our door, because we felt the site wasn’t ready. Having launched the Cinema of the Month and Retail Insights sections with the support of Vista and Coke, we will be announcing more partnerships in the future that allow us to broaden our coverage. We want to keep CJ free instead of putting up a pay-wall and commercial partnerships with such blue chip companies are what enable us to fund the continued growth of the site and the coverage it provides.

We are constantly looking to launch new features and regular columns, everything from the Top Women in Global Cinema (one of our most shared posts ever) and cutting edge news and analysis on topical issues such as MoviePass or the Samsung Cinema LED, to weekly and monthly posts such as the Cinema News Digest and CJ Interviews. We are constantly evolving and trying to improve.  As an example, we recently broke out the Cinema Property Update into separate features, dividing them into different monthly geographies.

What began as a side project cooked up at informal meetings during Showest and Cinema Expo in 2007 as a way to share knowledge and information with colleagues, has expanded over the course of ten years both in terms of Celluloid Junkie’s scope and reach.  Initially the only people who visited CJ were the handful of co-workers we told about it.  Word quickly spread through professional circles and pretty soon we had readers from all over the world working in diverse areas of the industry.

The few hundred visitors that stopped by CJ in the first month or two after we launched in 2007 has grown into tens of thousands depending on the month.  CJ is now visited each year by professionals from 153 countries.  And readers are sharing our posts on a more frequent basis, educating others within the industry about the information they are finding on CJ.  This has required us to devote more time and resources to simply maintaining the site with additional technology infrastructure.  Not that we’re complaining.  We had always wanted to learn how to properly “spin up” a load balancing web server anyway.  (Thankfully, that now happens automatically on heavier traffic days.)

There’s been so much happening in the last ten years that it is almost impossible to summarise. We saw the rise and slump and rise again of China; we saw AMC become the world’s largest cinema chain; we saw the tragic shooting in a cinema in Aurora; we have written about innovations such as immersive audio, HDR, laser projection, motion seats and more; we now expect to be able to order a glass of wine and hot meals in the cinema; and we keep seeing the most talented of artists believing that the big screen is the best place for their stories, whether they are Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Bong Joon-ho or the Russo brothers.

We feel that this is the best possible time to be working in the theatrical distribution and cinema industries. This is not to say that they do not face challenges, but that the innovation that has sustained it as a way to be entertained in groups for over a century will keep it alive for a long time to come. We look forward to reflecting, analysing and evolving alongside and as part of the industry, hopefully for many more decades.

All of this has been possible because people like you visit our site, read our posts, share them, discuss them and use them in your daily business. So we want to thank you for your support over the years and look forward to many more. Do please drop us a line, talk to us at one of the many events we attend or let us know your thoughts about CJ. After all, this is your site too.

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Other cinemas include KinoNor (Trondheim, Aurora and Haugesund), KinoAlliansen (20 out of 25 cinemas), KinoSør and Drammen (both partly owned by Nordisk Film) and several municipally owned cinemas. Nordic’s rival SF Norge, however, has chosen to boycott the concept in favour of its own scheme.

The idea behind Kinoklubb is based on the two decade old Biografklub Denmark in Denmark, which has around 200,000 members and account for about one million cinema tickets sold each year. Members have to pay NOK 149 (USD $17.45) per year, in return for 50% discount on up to seven selected films, with a focus on quality cinema.

Current films on offer include “Birkebeinerna” (below), “Carol”, “Grand Hotel”, “Perfect Day” and “Lovekvinnen”. The films are selected by a board of film and cinema veterans. The membership pays for itself for anyone that uses it at least three times per year. The aim is to have 40,000 members this year and 100,000 members “longer term”, with an overall aim to grow cinema attendance.

The scheme is targeted at women in their forties (note the picture of the website), as well as ‘date night’ and ‘work colleague movie night’. It will be marketed across Filmweb, which is Norway’s most popular film site, as well as on TV spots for films trailers such as “Birkebeinerne” that will include locations where the film is showing, newspaper (print and online), as well as Google and Facebook.

SF Norge, which is Norway’s second largest cinema chain, is not participating in this scheme but has launched its own promotion. Store Filmopplevelser (Big Screen Experiences) is a discount/gift card scheme whereby for NOK 499 (USD $58.45) audiences get six tickets to selected films.

The scheme has already been operating for a couple of years, but will now be expanded. Previously the scheme could only be used for a selection of films promoted, but can now also be used for all films showing at SF Norge’s cinemas, though without a discount for non-promoted films. There are 10 films part of the promotion in the spring slate, which happens to include four of the five films that are also part of Kinoklubb’s offer.

All SF Norge cinemas are part of this scheme, including co-owned cinemas such as Bergen, Stavanger, Sandness and the municipally owned cinema in Fredrikstad, which happens to also be part of the rival Kinoklubb. Quoted in Kinomagasinet, SF Kino’s Head of Sales and Marketing  Jon Einar Sivertsen says that, “we have a much lower ambition and cost level with Store Filmopplevelser.” According to Sivertsen discounting and price sensitivity is mainly an issue for younger cinema goers rather than for mature audiences.

While it looks like the battle for Norwegian audiences between Nordisk and SF Norge – owned by rival Danish and Swedish exhibitors with pan-Scandinavian ambitions –  will heat up in 2016, the winner could ultimately be overall cinema going in Norway.

The post Norway Launches Cinema Scheme for Quality Films – SF Boycotts appeared first on Celluloid Junkie.

English translation: Mikhail Prokofiev

Edit of English translation: Nick Holdsworth and Elisa Koshkina

Amazon Kindle edition, 238 pages

At a time when Hollywood box office trends are tracked on a daily basis, with a summer declared a ‘hit’ or a ‘flop’ by the time its barely reached its half-way mark, it is refreshing to read a book that take a long term perspective on cinema box office. A really long term perspective.

Oleg Berezin is a familiar face to anyone at the international cinema circuit. As the Managing Director of Neva Film, Berezin has been active in all aspects of the cinema and motion picture industry in Russia. In addition to providing everything from subtitling services to cinema installations, Neva Film is also the leading publisher of statistics and information on the cinema market in the Russian Federation. Berezin was also President as of National Russian Movie Theaters Owners Alliance Kinoalliance and organiser since 2001 of the Annual Kino Expo Conference Cinema Business held in Russia. Somehow, in between all this and his engagements with EDCF, SMPTE, ECA and more, he has managed to find the time to write a major piece of scholarly research on the cyclical nature of the cinema business.

Berezin eschews the horse-race mentality of most of today’s cinema industry commentators, currently obsessing that Universal and Disney carved up 60% of this summer’s box office between them, and instead looks at trends that span decades. In doing so he is embracing the hypothesis of the existence of cycles in motion picture consumption, which is in turn based on the theory of major cycles by Russian economist Nikolay Kondratyev. The idea of applying Kondratieff wave cycles to the motion picture industry is a bold one, not least at it is a medium that have simultaneously exhibit enormous change (sound, colour, digital, home and mobile consumption) as well as remaining stable (there are active cinemas that have been in continuous use for over a century).

Berezin recognises both of these issues in identifying here principal “screen systems” that have to be taken into account in any analysis of the topic:

First, there are systems of collective viewing that are specifically equipped premises for the public viewing of films: movie theaters, as well as various large- screen systems aimed at mass viewing…

Second, there are systems for family or group film viewing: home movie theaters and TV sets. To some extent, small-scale cinema halls (private, home- based, and commercial) may also be treated as such.

Third, there are systems for personal viewing. Gadgets belonging to this category include TV sets and PC monitors…and personal gadgets: portable-screen DVD players, smartphones, tablets, video-glasses, laptops, and others that are similar in their consumer properties.

Films have today in many ways returned to their pre-cinema roots, when it could only be consumed one-on-one in the Edison peepshow Kinetoscopes, as noted by Oscar-winning sound designer and film theorist Walter Murch. Berezin is thus not trying to brush away the innovations and changes that have happened to film beyond the big screen, but embrace them as a manifestation of the “cross fertilisation” of the different screen system, and also sees it as a way of forecasting the future of the medium.

Berezin’s second bold move is to frame the analysis within the context of two markets: the United States and USSR/Russia. While not a given choice at first glance, there is much that unites these two markets over the long term, not least in terms of being major global economies. Despite having had a command economy during its communist years, Soviet Russia always maintained a vibrant (if censored and controlled) film and cinema industry, which has survived and re-flourished after the fall of communism. Anyone looking for the best cinemas being built today would be hard pressed to chose between a VIP luxury screen in Saint-Petersburg or an Alamo Drafthouse opening in Los Angeles. Berezin also draws on previous scholarly work on trends in cinema attendance from the likes of Pautz, Kokonis, Vogel, Zhabsky and others.

Validating a key premise of the Kondratieff cycles is the influence technical innovation has business cycles, with the mass adoption of television in the United States in the mid-20th century directly linked to the decline in cinema attendance and ensuing attempt at introducing innovation in the exhibition business – colour, widescreen, stereoscopic 3D, etc. While cinema attendance has fallen in adult numbers (i.e. tickets sold) since then, a look at per capita per annum deviations in the US does confirm a cyclical trend (see above).

As such there is an argument to be made for examining the box office from a cyclical perspective to understand future trends. Berezin makes a strong case for patterns of stability within these waves:

Interestingly, despite the headlong growth of the film screening market in the US during the last 40 years, its annual box office has stabilized at the level of USD 4–5 billion in 1984 prices, adjusted for the CPI63. On the one hand, this suggests there is a certain limit to the financial market capacity for film exhibition. On the other, it serves as a visible example of the physical laws of wave theory in action: the curve of box office dynamics results from a superposition of two waves—the cycle of motion picture attendance and the cycle of ticket price.

The current growth in up-charging for everything from 3D, recliners, Imax and 4D seating should thus be understood by its link to falling or plateauing cinema attendance in the west, which it tries to compensate for. Statistics for USSR/Russia are more scattered than those for the US, but Berezin nevertheless interpolates the gaps to find curves, though he admits that “due to a number of external factors that influenced movie theater attendance in the USSR, it is rather difficult to model it mathematically.” But there is still an argument to be made for the industrialisation growth period in the USSR in the 1920s-1960s period and the upswing in the mid- 1990s to mid-2010s in Russia

Berezin then does an admirable job of plotting the cinema cycles against the two consumer electronic trends that have most influenced film consumption, first for the home and secondly for personal devices – what we today talk about as the ‘second screen’, meaning the ‘other’ screen to the television and now also the cinema, rather than sequentially, in which case it ought to be ‘third screen.’ (see diagram below).

In doing so he refutes the notion that new platforms for consuming films spell the end for the medium that preceded it. In this regard the Kodratieff cycles for film/cinema would seem to refute the ‘Creative Destruction‘ hypothesis of economist Joseph Schumpeter (one of Kodratyev’s strongest supporters), whereby steam engines replace canal barges for transport, automobiles kill off trams and email spells the end of faxes.

While not touching on the artistic aspects (which would have made this study impossibly long and complex), it also chimes with the theory put forward eloquently by French-Canadian director Robert Lepage that new forms of visual and audio-visual art do not replace what comes before it but liberates it, with photography not destroying painting but freeing it to explore abstract, cubism, pointillism and more, rather than aiming for pure visual reproduction, same as theatre has become avant grade and not killed off by cinema.

Berezin displays an almost encyclopaedic knowledge and understanding of cinema history, as well as reaching back to the stage theatrical entertainment business that preceded it, both in Tsarist Russia and Elizabethan England, as well as the later early US theatre (as in play performance venues) of the late 19th century.

The history of the invention of cinema is detailed, but while of interest to cinema archeologists as myself, is perhaps too much detail without going into disputes of origin (no mention of Louise Le Prince, for example, and on page 49 German cinema pioneers Emil and Max Skladanowsky are reduced to “M.S kladanowsky” [sic]), meaning that in some ways it is not detailed enough. But this is a small quibble and one can only hope that Berezin finds the time to devote a full book in the future just on this topic.

Chapter Four on ‘the Industrialisation Cycle of Theatrical Film Exhibition (USA: 1910–1970; USSR/RUSSIA: 1910/1921–1995)’ is where Berezin really hits his stride. Given his country of origin it should perhaps not be surprising, but Berzin provides very illuminating examples and anecdotes about the growth of the film and cinema industry in early Soviet Russia, which should be of particular interest to readers of the English edition of the book, being perhaps already familiar with the similar early period for the Hollywood industry. 

There is a recognition of the de-synchronization of the industrialization cycles of theatrical film exhibition in the US and the USSR, though this does not undermine the basic theory but means that the trains of theory follow similar tracks but at slightly different time tables. While Hollywood had its share of tyrants running the major studios, none could institute Five Year Plans for production quotas of their films, however much they lived up to the second part of the name of their ‘dream factories’. Berezin then covers pretty much all significant technical, social and institutional changes that have affected the cinema business on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the different phases,

Cinema chains and Hollywood studios will of course be most interested not in what Berezin’s book has to say about the history of the cinema medium but what of its future prospects. He starts the chapter on forecasting new trends and cycles in theatrical film exhibition with a major caveat:

Predicting the development of movie theaters and exhibition for the next 15– 25 years, when the next cycle in the development of the industry – convergence – enters an explosive phase, is a challenging task best suited to futurologists.

But with the disclaimer out of the way he then sets about pretty much doing just that; predicting the future of the cinema industry, though in scholarly rather than sensationalist terms. (Sorry, no indication about whether we’ve reached ‘Peak Superhero‘ or if the next cycle of Star Wars and Avatar films will be mega-hits).

Anyone who had been paying attention in the previous chapters would have seen a worrying downward slope of the curve in terms of where cinemas find themselves today.

Berezin’s interest lies not so much in predicting the future as in seeing how cycles are likely to play out, given future changes of technology. This entails defining at least two components, ” the starting point of the cycle and the principal directions of technological progress.” As such the fourth cycle of film is estimated to begin in the period 2020-2025 and will be characterised by a ‘convergence’ of all three film consumption platforms: public, home and personal.

The crystal ball takes in everything from buzzwords like “transmedia storytelling” to specific technical concept such as the the Disney KeyChest digital cloud, but the point about content becoming increasingly independent of platforms is a valid and important one. This then entails an understanding of the home and personal screen technology systems. Again Berezin knows his history, but these sections seem less necessary towards his overall point than the cinema history chapter.

Berezin’s conclusions might seem heretical to cinema purists. “First, the audience consuming all three systems of audiovisual communication – movie theaters, home screens, and personal screens – is, for all practical purposes, one and the same.” Not all screens may be created equal (in size, that is), but as far as most consumers go, they are almost interchangeable when it comes to watching films. Here the principal bone of contention with Berezin’s cycle would be that his two home screen cycles neatly explain broadcast television, but offer less account of packaged home media (VHS, DVD and Blu-ray), whose peak in terms of commercial impact was in-between the two home screen cycle’s peak points, particularly for the United States.

If, as this study argues, we currently find ourselves in the second-half cycles downswing phase, the good news is that a new up-cycle in less than a decade away. As Berezin puts it, “The present cycle is stimulating the search for new markets that will develop through the upswing phase and promoting the export of technologies and capital.” We should also already now be encountering the technologies that will sow the seed for the future growth cycle, whether these are wide coluor gamut and HDR laser projection, immersive audio or motion seats. As science fiction writer William Gibson famously said, “The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

This may not be a book written for the widest possible masses in the style of “Freakonomics”, but a dense, deep and scholarly text. (Berezin himself joked that it makes good reading for insomniacs.) Yet it is all the better for it, as anyone who can navigate through the early chapters on the long-term cycle economic theory that underpins it will find a rewarding, illuminating and stimulating journey through a century of the cinema medium, with a credible argument for its long term viability in its fourth ‘cycle’.

Here it is also worth highlighting the excellent English translation by Mikhail Prokofiev, as well as the text edit of the English translation by Nick Holdsworth and Elisa Koshkina, which makes the book read as if it had been written in English in the first place. This book is worth anyones time who cares about where cinema has come from and where it is headed and is available on Amazon now.

Finally, the book is also a very timely refutation on perspective on the perennial claim that cinemas are dying in the face of the latest threat from television/VHS/piracy/Netflix. Or as the New York Times chief film critic put it “You might end up watching these at a theater, on a tablet or in your den, courtesy of Netflix or BitTorrent or your local cable provider. But you will not be able to mistake them for anything but movies. What is cinema? You know it when you see it.”

[In addition to buying the book, I urge anyone interested in this topic to attend the FREE IBC Big Screen session on “Cinema 2020: Seeing the Future Business today” on Monday 14 September in Amsterdam, where Neva Film’s Maria Bezenkova will no doubt mention her boss’ book in discussing the future of the cinema medium with a distinguished panel.]

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