Film Distribution

The promotors of Shrek III have demonstrated just how to make Americans watch your film with major sales this weekend, knocking Spiderman 3 off the top of the charts.

Luc Besson is not so happy though, he has criticised the film distributors for the poor response from US audiences to the Invisibles film. Normally about half a film's takings comes from the US and the other from the rest of the World. The Invisibles made only $15m in the US but made over $90m which does give cause for concern over how it was released. The distributor Weinstein Company are not particularly well known for promotions to a younger audience, Besson speculates other reasons why the film did not float well:
"Why the critics didn’t like Arthur was because they changed so much of the film and tried to pretend the film was American. The critics aren’t stupid. They watched the film, they vaguely smell American but they can feel the film is forced for an American audience. The film is European. It’s made by a Frenchman."

Arthur and the Invisibles is now available on DVD.

Other useful links on film distribution:
www.launchingfilms.tv
Big Film Shorts

Films go digital

The cost of printing on film and distributing the reels are large, the film projector mechanisms are costly to maintain and require experts to maintain. This all adds up to higher costs for cinema goers and less profits for the film makers. Some cinemas such as the one in Leicester square have been digital for some time now but the films are still "printed" onto a hard disk rather than a film and distributed physically. Approximately 7% of the cinemas in the US have digital projection.

Given the improvements in networking recently this old style process could be a thing of the past. In a collaboration between several distributors and cinemas the idea of sending films over the wire. The Digital Cinema Implementation Partners believe that they will be able in increase the flexibility of cinemas and provide greater supply for hit films and for niche films to have short runs at no additional cost.

In the home video market there are plans too with the DVD Forum in Tokyo approving the CSS Managed Recording Specification. This technolgy would initially allow kiosks and shops to download and burn DVDs on demand for playback at home. It is believed that the new format would work with the majority of home players.

This all looks very promising but Peter Broderick a consultant from Paradigm thinks that the cinemas need to Rethink Film Distribution completely.