The N.Y. Times has a good overview this morning of Mark Cuban’s plan to mess up the movie business for incumbents. It all centers around HD, digital technologies, and changing the release schedules, and it is an interesting read:
Theatrical releases, which account for about $9 billion in revenue, have become expensive trailers for the real deal, a $24 billion after-market for home video and DVD’s. The current food chain has made everybody fat and happy while the mere existence of a digitized entertainment product – ripe for the downloading – makes the industry shudder.
The theory behind 2929 goes like this: Over the past few years, Mr. Cuban and Mr. Wagner have acquired or built HDNet Films, which funds smaller budget movies, Magnolia Pictures for distribution, Landmark Theaters for exhibiting, and HDNet and HDNet Movies for cable broadcast. Consumers with access to those cable networks will be able to see a film at home on the day it comes out. Or they can see it in the theater or, once details are worked out, simply buy the DVD. By closing the window between when a movie is released and when it becomes available on DVD – usually about four months – 2929 will save on marketing by not having to advertise twice.
I have to confess I’m fond of writer David Carr’s punchy prose, and given the rich subject (Cuban) Carr gets off some nice quips (“…one gets the impression [Cuban] does everything but brush his teeth by e-mail’) in this piece. Here, for example, is Carr doing Cuban’s bio:
[After selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo,] Mr. Cuban took up blogging, basketball and terrorizing referees, buying the Dallas Mavericks for $280 million and racking up fines for railing against league officiating while using a blog to agitate and inform his fan base.
Finally, the piece discloses there was recently a high-level get-together of A-list effects directors, including Lucas, James Cameron, and Peter Jackson, at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch north of San Francisco. The subject? How to get film exhibitors to adopt digital technology. Would have been a fun meeting to attend, me-thinks.
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