The Great American Movie Theater

“So – is movie going dead?” asks North Texas theaterman Jeremy Devine, surveying a packed house one recent weekday afternoon at the Ridgmar outpost of his company, Rave Motion Pictures, in west Fort Worth.

“Hardly,” he answers his own question.

“Or is moviegoing dying, slowly?” Devine continues, noting that one crammed auditorium is showing a special-interest concert film in eye-popping 3-D.

“No – it’s changing,” Devine explains. “And some of us, as exhibitors, are taking the lead for the changes.”

Change seems the right term for the movie-exhibition industry. Upheaval might be more like it – although most paying customers will not have noticed any drastic alterations in the way a motion picture looks or sounds when splashed onto the bigger-than-real screen.

Today, a gradually sweeping conversion to industrial-strength digital projection – with a 3-D visual component as an increasingly familiar ingredient – has begun to alter the filmgoing landscape as decisively as the talking-picture transformation had done during 1927-1930.

The question theater owners are asking or at least afraid their customers are asking: Why pay to sit in an auditorium, when one can watch moving pictures in the comfort of one’s home?

That question has fueled most such efforts by the Hollywood studios and the movie-theater industry to stay apace with television in terms of ticket-selling sensationalism. Hence Cinerama, and 3-D, and Sensurround, and multi-auditorium theater construction – among other big-screen come-ons in recent times. All such developments have been calculated to lure the entertainment-hungry masses away from the tube.

Jazz Singer to Hannah Montana

The most striking new change in the historic role of the theater may rest with one unconventional feature-length attraction of 2008: Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour.

That 3-D musical event-film has grossed almost $65 million since February in limited theatrical play (682 auditoriums, primarily in North America), impressing one industry analyst, Jeff Bock, as “the sign of an overwhelming change in the film-exhibition industry.” Best of Both Worlds, built around the Disney Channel pop-country franchise, represents a new breed of theatrical event-video programming –

ranging from sports tournaments to opera to sensationalized 3-D adventure films. This development, in turn, represents the theaters’ gradually diminishing dependency upon the conventional feature-movie industry.

Bock’s office at Exhibitor Relations Co. in Los Angeles examines weekly box-office returns in perspective with the studios’ moviemaking expenditures. He explains: “Hannah Montana already has proven its place in history — the attraction that proves the validity of event-picture programming as an alternative to the usual feature-film bookings.

“It has taken the film-exhibition industry too long – nearly three years since the big box-office drop-off of 2005 and a decisive emergence of the promise of digital video – to catch on to the fact that a change in programming is needed,” adds Bock. “Of course, a more standardized form of digital-projection technology has been slow to stabilize, too. And the greater versatility of digital projection, as opposed to 35-millimeter film, is crucial to the new development of alternative programming.”

Fad component notwithstanding, Hannah Montana is no isolated fluke. Dallas-based Rave Motion Pictures has followed through with an event-attraction rock-music documentary called Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream, and with the serialized booking of grand-opera productions from the San Francisco Opera and the La Scala Opera House in Italy, among other off-Hollywood selections. A prevailing event-screening ticket price of around $5 more than the usual feature-film admission suggests an uncommon confidence on the part of the theater operators in the phenomenon.

Pulling back the curtain

Less noticed by audiences has been what is going on behind the scenes in many theaters.

The digital-projection conversion of many movie theaters not only relieves the theater operators of the cumbersome process of handling “real” film, it also enables such enhancements as 3-D projection and a streaming-video process to capture sporting events and staged concerts or dramatic productions.

Jeremy Devine, Rave Motion Pictures’ vice president for marketing, says a companywide conversion last year to digital projection has opened ever-greater possibilities in special-show programming. Devine has found, for one thing, that some new movie’s 3-D version, with its illusion of visual depth, will out-sell the same film’s 2-D, or “flat-image” edition by a margin of three-to-one.

Most Hollywood movies have a strong opening weekend, but then begin to taper off quickly, said Devine.

“If your theater has, say, 18 or 20 screens, then your low-traffic nights can mean too many empty seats,” he said, “so you wind up showing your usual movie fare to less-than-full auditoriums.

“So how to combat those slower stretches when the movies aren’t packing ’em in? How about special-event programming that the customers can’t find at home? The approach seems to be working, so far as the Rave theaters are concerned.”

Many other theater-operating companies are not so flexibly positioned, however. Such comprehensive digital-picture conversions as the Rave development represent an advance guard in an industry that has been generally slow to catch up.

At Kansas City, Mo.-based AMC Entertainment Inc., whose operations include the AMC Palace in downtown Fort Worth, spokesman Andy DiOrio notes the formation last year of a coalition called Digital Cinema Implementation Partners. This teaming involves AMC Entertainment, Cinemark USA Inc. and Regal Entertainment Group, with a big-screen advertising company called National CineMedia.

“Through our partnership,” says DiOrio, “we have begun the installation of digital-cinema systems in our new-build construction locations late this year, such as AMC Highland Village 12 [near Lewisville]. Retrofitting existing locations will be done on a market-by-market deployment, beginning early to mid-2008, and will take three to four years to complete.”

And a projected three- to four-year span for digital conversion can mean self-defeating lag-time in an industry where – as Hannah Montana and the opera-event showings have demonstrated – a digital-projection system can mean the difference between landing a seat-filling special attraction and remaining content with the brief shelf-life of conventional Hollywood-feature presentations.

Rave’s Devine suggests realistically that the prevailing moviegoing fare will be “the familiar 2-D feature-film presentations from the major motion-picture studios.” He adds, however: “But the range of alternative programming, from 3-D features to sports to concerts, will be increasing all along.”

These include Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (New Line Cinema), an adaptation of Jules Verne’s 19th-century novel, starring Brendan Fraser; an animated fantasy called Fly Me to the Moon (Summit Entertainment); and Monsters vs. Aliens (DreamWorks), a spoof of science-fiction movies. Several other 3-D titles are due during 2008-2009 — more such movies than there are 3-D digital screens on which to play them.

No small change

Of approximately 37,000 movie-theater screens in the United States, only about 4,600 have been converted to digital-projection capability, according to the National Association of Theater Owners.

A digital-projection conversion now costs approximately $75,000 per auditorium — down significantly from the 2007 figure of $100,000 per screen, but still approximately twice the cost of an old-technology film-handling projector. A digital 3-D system requires an additional $20,000. The principal seller of 3-D technology, Los Angeles-based Real D Cinema, appears to have cornered the market on the most simply operated and consistently reliable process.

To help struggling theater owners finance these conversions, Sony Electronics in Los Angeles announced its Digital Cinema Services & Solutions Division that offers to supply owners with programs for installation, maintenance and financing.

“Digital cinema technology has been steadily moving into the mainstream of the commercial theater market,” says Sony’s Michael Fidler. “Our goal is to help accelerate this process.”

The Sony project touts a tighter system of pictorial presentation known as 4K- resolution, as opposed to the 2K-resolution norm that appeared to have become standard in 2005.

Such distinctions amount, no doubt, to mere techno-babble gibberish to the average moviegoer awaiting the latest Indiana Jones release. (See review page 39) A typical customer might settle for such amenities as a comfortable seat, an audible soundtrack level and a consistently focused picture in exchange for the price of a ticket to see something that cannot be found on cable or DVD.

They might also settle for a good meal. Locally, two operators have chosen to take aim at moviegoers’ appetites to keep them in their seats. Dallas-based Movie Tavern has 12 locations across the country where patrons are served a meal along with their movie. Similarly, Dallas-based Studio Movie Grill has seven locations across the state. Both operations use technology, like handheld devices and remote call devices, to minimize intrusions from the servers. The two companies have found themselves a favorite of developers of so-called “lifestyle” centers. A high-profile Movie Tavern is set to open as part of Cypress Equities’ West 7th development, and a Studio Movie Grill is currently a centerpiece of Arlington’s Highlands retail center.

“We like them because they attract an older audience beyond the typical mall cinema,” said Kirk Williams, vice president of development for Cypress Equities in Addison. “It’s the same demographic we want to attract to our development.”

But for those picture-show operators who are caught up in the risky task of adapting to a fast-changing marketplace, the technological distinctions represent a crucial set of complications.

The state of the industry, for the foreseeable future, recalls nothing so much as the epidemic frenzy of the fading 1920s, when the larger movie studios began the costly installation of sound-recording equipment while the smaller studios kept making silent pictures for a vanishing market. It was a time when theaters felt torn between sound-on-film and sound-on-disk machinery, each with its advantages and drawbacks. It also was a time when many movie-business insiders waited impatiently for the talking-picture scare to prove a short-lived fad — no such luck, as things turned out.

Unlike that technological turmoil of the 1920s, however, the digital-cinema phenomenon has already settled in to stay, subject to evolution. Its greater prevalence is just a matter of time. A famous quotation popularly ascribed to baseball’s Yogi Berra comes to mind: “Déjà vu all over again.”

Contact Price at mprice@bizpress.net

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What are the movie theaters like in your area? Do they have any of the new features described in the article?

What is your opinion: Are movie theaters dying?

How do these new developments in movie theater showings reflect a new art form?

Do you like to go see regular movies at the movie theater? What movies do you like to see?

Have you seen a 3-D movie at the theater? What did you think?

If movie theaters are showing concerts and operas, it may not be long before they are showing broadway musicals, plays and dance performances. Do you see this as a good thing, or is it going to diminish these art forms if people are not seeing them live? EXPLAIN

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