A Steady Diet of Film

WWAGD? (What Would Alan Greenspan Do?)

There's been a lot of film press quick to declare the Clooney/Cuban/Soderbergh new model of distribution a failure based on the first week of Bubble's performance. But these writers are just too accepting of the doomsday scenarios being perpetuated by the studio system.

$70,644 on 32 screens (and those are Landmark screens, which are only present in niche markets as it is) is actually a pretty good opening week for a film with no A-list actors (considered the driving force in indie film financing these days) and a marketing campaign that consisted of a trailer being shown in some theaters and Soderbergh making an appearance in Ohio. It's no Ocean's 12 but if Bubble only cost $1.2M to make it's not hard to see that films made and distributed in this model are way less of a risk investment than the indies getting made for upwards of $10M that have to play the festival crapshoot game and more often than not wind up sitting on shelves for years (or ever).

The film industry, even moreso than the music industry (and isn't that a wading pool that is getting smaller by the day), has been too defensive and afraid to embrace new techologies and even when they have (with AMC's deal to do a digital wide release of indie film Evergreen) they tend to half-ass it (in Evergreen's case, completely flake out). It's an understandable fear because to these old guys the mediums and formats probably seem super-alien (uhh, Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD, anyone? Anyone at all?) or fly by night (see: Disney's DivX disaster) but the current system hemmorages money, produces almost nothing but crap and is rapidly losing the interest of American film-goers. As the saying goes, innovate or die.

posted by Erin @ Thursday, February 02, 2006