The Future of Film
A friend of mine was recently asked to be on a panel about the future of film for The Academy (yes, that one), and asked what I thought about where the industry was going in the next decade. Below are some of the thoughts which came spilling out once I got typing, in no particular order:
We’ll blur the lines between series of movies and series of television episodes pretty quickly. There will be a time when there is no meaningful distinction between the two.
The audience experience is going to become a lot more core to the creative process of filmmaking. We can’t assume that our audience is just watching a movie in a theater or on their TV anymore, and some of the most interesting work is going to come from incorporating the basics of user experience design into creating movies. This is already happening with 3D - we know that a viewer is having a different experience in a 3D theater versus their non-3D television set. And episodes from Mad Men’s next season will be 5 minutes longer on iTunes. But I fully expect different versions of a film to be “designed” for theatrical release, home viewing, mobile viewing, co-viewing, etc. It will be optimized for casual viewers, and will give true fans even more ways to give you their money.
On a much more extreme note, some people have been recently writing about client-side dynamic video assembly. Think of it like this: the news feed I see on Facebook doesn’t “exist” anywhere until I go to it. I log in and say “give me my news feed”, and it’s assembled (and refreshed) on the fly. Once I click away, that exact view of it ceases to exist. It’s dynamic, like all software is.
One day, video could be assembled the same way, based on an awareness of who the viewer is, where I’m watching, other viewer’s reactions to what they watched, etc. The way that Flipboard makes a dynamic “magazine” of content for me - one day we could have video experiences like that. The tools for this are being built today - tools that generate something that looks more like software for dynamically cutting video, rather than just the cut video itself. This is a side effect of every screen becoming a computer - they’ll all have the ability to run software.
I’ve been on a tear about “all media is becoming software” recently. It’s a thing I think a lot about.
The theatrical experience will get much more upscale and event focused. Theaters, too, will focus on the audience experience, getting fancier and more of them offering food and alcohol. And there will be more one-off special events, where you pay a premium to see something exclusive or hard to find. We’re close to a $100/person opening night for films, complete with after party and VIP section.
And theatrical windows will shrink. Most money is made in the first week anyway, so why not concentrate the audience into that time. Release a movie in theaters for a week, on a $25 ticket. The week after, rent it at home for $35. Then drop he price by $5/week until it hits zero, at which point it goes to Netflix. Something like that. There’s just so much media competing for attention, that if you don’t see it quickly, you probably won’t see it at all.
In the short-term, production budgets will shrink as the industry adapts to new business models, and then expand again as a new set of standard practices emerges. This will take a long time and cost a lot of people their jobs when they don’t adapt quickly enough. We’ve seen all this before, there are good notes to cheat from.
And if I’m right about all media becoming software, one day we won’t even have that, we’ll just have a “media” industry that produces “content,” for lack of a better word. But we’ll need a better word.
-Adam
