When did Cinemas lose our trust?

I loved what Tilda Swinton said this week. According to Swinton, “going to the cinema now is all about guarantees. Did it get good reviews? How is it doing at the box office? Will I get comfortable seats, and be able to buy toxic-waste sweets?” Whereas what you want is more like “going to a restaurant that you trust and saying, ‘Feed me’.”

When did cinemas lose our trust? Now before we go, we read reviews and advertising,
and already know that the film is likely to meet our needs. As a child you would go to the pictures, and it was unknown and exciting.

People want to go to the cinama out of trust, be surprised and delighted. Not because they already know the films. Swinton adds you want to be taken and told, ‘You are going to love this’.
This is one reason why film Festivals are growing so much, and cinemas remain flat with their tried and tested paint by numbers formulae.

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Re-connecting with the audience with quality films

Why are audiences being ignored and being fed the same old homogenised content wherever they go ?

This is one of the biggest issues facing independent cinema today. The Edinburgh film festival starts this week, and festivals around Europe and in the USA are growing significantly with frequent sell out audiences. Yet many of these movies will never see the light of day again, and more often that not the best of the movies on show will disappear only to be seen on one cinema in London or go straight to DVD.

The main reason for this is that in today

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Smart Crowds

Eric Schmidt, CEO Google, said, Wikinomics heralds the biggest change in collaboration to date. Thanks to the Internet, masses of people outside the boundaries of traditional hierarchies can innovate to produce content, goods and services.

But when you look at the movie industry today, traditional hierarchies and business models are not disappearing, and are in some cases being stubborn to disappear e.g. release windows between cinema and DVD, and ever increasing marketing campaigns for blockbuster films.
Surely they have to realise that this model cannot go on for ever. There is a limit to the ROI (Return on Investment), chasing bigger returns by pumping in increasingly bigger Promotions. The latest examples being Speed Racer, and Sex and the City.

Are there actual films here or are they simply extension of advertising campaigns, one a video game, one a long product placement ad for fashion labels? Like the housing market, and the stock market, there is a natural limit to the leveraged loans and chasing of bigger and bigger investments, but with the bonus led culture of the Studio Executives then they are the last people who will bring a halt to the current model.

Meanwhile profound changes in the nature of technology and the

internet, are giving rise to powerful new business models, and these are based on community and collaboration. Not on outdated studio models from the 1970’s when Jaws saw the entry of the Blockbuster. Prior to Jaws was perhaps one of the best periods in independent cinema, Easy Rider and many more.

Now is the time for smarter not bigger. And the smart way forward is collaboration. People will learn and teach each other. By leveraging the power of the community, a new model is born that can succeed in the new world. Smart crowds.

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