The World Needs More Ninjas

The NY Times has an article that makes me optimistic that the movie industry is more willing to adapt to the digital age than the recording industry. Consumers are no longer biting for the inferior products:

“Part of this is the fact that the movies may not have lived up to the expectations of the audience, not just in this year, but in years prior,” said Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which had some flops this summer, including the science fiction action movie “Stealth” and the romantic comedy “Bewitched.” “Audiences have gotten smart to the marketing, and they can smell the good ones from the bad ones at a distance.”

…

In previous years, he said, “you could still count on enough people to come whether you failed at entertaining them or not, out of habit, or boredom, or a desire to get out of the house. You had a little bit of backstop.” With competition from video games, hundreds of television channels and DVD’s, that’s no longer the case, he said.

To compound this effect, I think information propagates much quicker and widespread than ever before as well. In the past, you would have to go on the recommendations of a couple of well-known critics and the word-of-mouth from several of your friends of the course of weeks. Nowadays, the day a movie comes out, you can already get an aggregate reading from hundreds of critics and thousands of movie-goers about how good the movie is.

And, the comparative advantage of going to the theatre as opposed to watching at home has decreased significantly:

Warren Lieberfarb, a former Warner Brothers executive who was a main advocate of the DVD in the early 90’s, warned that going to the movies had become too expensive over all, given the excellent quality of home theater. “It’s not just the DVD. It’s not just the DVD window,” he said. “It’s the flat-panel television and the sound system, with the DVD option, that has radically changed the quality of the in-home experience. The home theater has arrived.” As a result, he said, “you have to change the business model of the movie business.”

No doubt about this one. For a couple to go to the movie costs almost $20, plus about half an hour of driving round-trip, sitting through annoying commercials before the movie, and putting up with those aggravating anti-piracy dots that they randomly inject into the movie (I guess most people don’t notice these, but I find them noticeable). By contrast, renting a movie costs $3 and there’s a Blockbuster within walking distance for us. The major downside is you have to wait six months for the movie to come out on video.