kane

[QUOTE=GatorB;15533279]I was just going with the numbers I saw on the site I saw them on so I can't verify if they were 100% accurate. I do believe I read too that total ticket sales were down, but let's be honest, the industry losing that many ticket sales during a major recession year is not that bad so I wouldn't say the industry is dying, or even hurting that bad.

They may also lose a ton of revenue. Part of going to the movies is because you want to see the movie now. You pay the premium price to get to see the movie today, on the big screen and not have to wait for it to come out on DVD. If they released it on DVD, pay per view, download and theater all at once they may get the same number of viewers, but many of them would pay far less to see the movies than those who went to see it in theater. You might argue that they could lower ticket prices to drive customers to the theater, but now we are moving into a different world. Much of the price of a movie ticket is set by the theater chain, not the studio so you would have to convince them to lower their portion of the ticket price as well.


All that said piracy would still run wild. When you look at the top 10 most downloaded movies on torrent for any given week at least half of them are movies that are still in theaters. If it is available on DVD/Blu Ray the same day it is released in the theater people can buy, burn it and share it and who knows how many people will download it for free. There is no way of telling how many of those people might have gone to see the movie in the theater and paid, but you can bet some of them would have. By making it available right then you can help make the piracy that much easy to pull off.

Also the theater is used as a marketing tool and a tool to decide the size of the DVD run. Some are no brainers. Anyone would have been able to tell that Dark Knight was going to be huge and places like blockbuster would have ordered a ton of copies and stores would have ordered a ton of copies of the DVD. But there are a lot of movies that get good word of mouth and build an audience in the theater and then get nominated for awards and those movies eventually make it to DVD and get a larger DVD release than they would otherwise have. Sure, you can always print more, but if your going to release everything at once, there will be more pressure for immediate success and a lot of good movies that eventually build an audience could get lost. One day there might be some kind of multiple release system like this in place, but I think it may end up doing more harm than good to the studios.




Both are valid points, but it can also be looked at the other way. If they sign a deal now and it turns out the internet wasn't what you thought it would be, than oh well, nobody made much money off of it. But if you sign a bad deal now and the internet turns out to be a boon for business, you missed out and it is harder to negotiate yourself up to higher position than down from that position.

The entertainment industry is full of schemers. Musicians often hire accountants to audit the books of a record label to make sure they are getting paid correctly and almost always they find they are owed more money. The same is with the movie industry. They tell you that you will get 1% of the net profits. The movie does 100 million at the box office and does well on DVD and other markets yet somehow through creative book keeping they tell you they never made a profit. This happens all the time. Why do you think big stars demand big salaries? In a perfect world they could make more by taking a tiny salary and taking a part of the profit, but they know they will never see much if any of that profit so they get what they can up front. The catch 22 is if you sue them you are screwed. Many in the industry won't hire you because they will be worried that you will sue them when you get done. This is why you almost never hear of big stars (or even mid level stars) filing suit against a studio. They just grin and bear it and hope being in the big movie gets them another job.

There is a pretty recent, somewhat famous case involving a movie called Hustle and Flow. The producer and director of the movie got everyone to work for next to nothing (far less than the SAG standard $800 a day) with the promise, via contract, that they would get a percentage of the profits. The movie comes out, it gets great reviews and becomes a hit. Taryn Manning, one of the stars of the movies, has said she has never seen a dime and will never see a dime. When she ran into the producer somewhere she asked him why he screwed the cast out of the money they are owed and he told her that he, "gave them all careers." Well, he gave Terrance Howard a career. A couple of other people in the movie had been in some other stuff and still get some smaller parts, but as she said nobody is beating her door down cast her. The only good thing about it is that since it got a large distribution it had to get SAG approval and she did end up getting paid her $800 a day for the shoot and she has gotten residuals from the studio.