A new survey reveals that making films available to download soon after their theatrical release does not put people off going to cinemas. So what turns you off going to the pictures?For a while now, video on demand has been seen as the enemy of cinema. Last April, some of the bigger studios proposed that films should be made available for download 60 days after their theatrical release, half the time that they'd take to reach DVD. The fury that this provoked from other outreaches of the movie industry almost couldn't have been bigger.
Cinema owners led the outcry – reasoning that their dirty, sticky, overpriced little pits could be no competition for the comfort of people's own homes – while big-name directors acted as the cavalry. The likes of Kathryn Bigelow, Peter Jackson and James Cameron argued that their films about explosions and cutesy paedophiles and glowing flowers were designed to be seen on big screens, not inconsequential little television sets. Making them available on VoD so quickly after their theatrical release would undermine all their hard work.
However, a new survey has revealed that the public doesn't actually care that much. New Empress magazine, a film quarterly, has discovered that only 6% of respondents said that this release window would stop them from seeing the film theatrically. And half said that they'd still use their local cinema even if the film had a simultaneous theatrical and VoD release.
Why? Is it because cinemas now allow you to watch many of your favourite films in glorious retrofitted 3D? Apparently not. A quarter of the survey's respondents cited 3D as something that put them off going to the cinema. Other reasons for not going to the cinema included ticket prices, the constant glut of remakes and reboots and other people playing with their phones during films.
So, if 3D and crippling expense and the fact that you have to be around other people are all reasons for not visiting the cinema, what are the solutions? According to the New Empress survey better ticket deals, more double bills and greater investment in making cinemas more luxurious would be a start.
But what do you think? Personally I'm quite a fan of VoD – it's cheaper than a cinema ticket, you don't have to sit through 25 minutes of adverts and trailers to see it and my home is mercifully free of giant-haired strangers who insist on sitting in front of me and obscuring my view of the screen. Increasingly I find that, unless I'm really excited about a new release, I'll just wait a few months and watch it on demand instead.
The ways that cinema could tempt me back are largely economic. Cineworld's Unlimited membership card seems like a cost-effective way to make people regularly return to the cinema; more so than Orange Wednesdays, at least, because they seem to work on a trade-off whereby you get a half-price ticket but have to share a room with all the screaming children and noisy eaters in a 20-mile radius. That said – and this is something that's been said a billion times elsewhere by everyone else – there's nothing quite as soul-destroying as paying a little bit extra to spend two hours watching a shoddy 3D post-conversion job in a pair of uncomfortable glasses. Ditching the pretence that 3D is either a) the future of cinema or b) a good thing at all would also be a good start.
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