Presently, there are several home-made movies that have been circulating the web; this makes us question, “is filmmaking – and proper training film school – still feasible?” Is there still a future left for the film business?
To be able to answer that inquiry correctly, we need to properly define our terms. Film essentially does not have a future. More often than not, movies are shot and projected digitally. In this type of business, there are holdouts. Steven Spielberg shoots on film and hasn’t wanted his works to be projected digitally. But even he had to give in with his last project, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. Paramount released it both on film and in digital format. The popular Michael Bay expresses himself in these words: “I’m old school because I like to shoot on film.” He points out that he wants his movies to play in theaters, that “Transformers” was not downloadable for an iPod. Bay and Spielberg may be the exceptions when it comes to shooting on film, but they are still part of the school of filmmakers around the world who want to tell stories professionally on the big screen.
But are there still audiences to that type of cinema? The kind of filmmaking with characters and a plot and set-ups that have to be edited together? The fact that today’s largest hits are home-movie clips of “The Worst Ice Cream Ever” and “Spider-Tard,” prompts us to ask: are people still sold out to feature films?
Cory Doctorow, a writer who believes that “commercially minded” big budget films “might simply die”, mentions in an online write-up called “Media Metamorphosis: How the Internet Will Devour, Transform or Destroy Your Favorite Medium” that the future will be controlled by cheap and crummy YouTube videos which, he says, will be seen by you and the “38 other people who are kinked just like you.”
Is Mr. Doctorow right on the spot? Is film-going soon to be a fading memory? Will people become more inclined to watching a fuzzy home movie on their mobile phones? Will the movie industry now be ruled by a kid with a flip-cam? Let’s go to the facts. The film “Where the Wild Things Are” grossed more than $30 million this weekend. That’s about three million people who went to see it in just three days and box office for the weekend is up forty percent from the same time last year. That’s way larger than any number of hits on any video on the internet. Even the low-budgeted feature (approximatey $20,000) “Paranormal Activity” has made more than 30 million dollars – on the average, that’s about $25,000 per theater.
Annual box office has not dropped since the worldwide web became such a vital part of our lives. The downtick in profits is in fact better than the downturn in the economy – it hovers around 1 to 2% per year. People still want to go out and have an experience in a moviehouse with other people, lose themselves in something outside of real life.
As Ron Howard shares to the current DGA Quarterly: “You try to tell a story that’s meaningful, and share it with people.” This shared story is what connects the people with their fellow moviegoers – and this is what they need. So while film may be dead, the prognosis for the process of filmmaking and film school is bright and the future of the movie-going experience appears to be strong and vital.
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