Sean Parker—the guy who rained ruin upon the record industry and also convinced Zuckerberg to drop the 'the' from The Facebook—wants to revolutionize the way you watch movies. "Screening Room" would allow you to watch films in the comfort of your own home the day they are released in theaters. For a price, of course:
Individuals briefed on the plan said Screening Room would charge about $150 for access to the set-top box that transmits the movies and charge $50 per view. Consumers have a 48-hour window to view the film.
In order to try and win over theater owners, Parker and Partners are reportedly offering a variety of goodies to exhibitors:
To get exhibitors on board, the company proposes cutting them in on a significant percentage of the revenue, as much as $20 of the fee. As an added incentive to theater owners, Screening Room is also offering customers who pay the $50 two free tickets to see the movie at a cinema of their choice. That way, exhibitors would get the added benefit of profiting from concession sales to those moviegoers.
I have no real thoughts on the economics of this because the economics of Hollywood are hard to predict. I imagine this sort of thing would hurt family films more at the box office than adult-oriented fare: $50 to screen a Pixar flick for two parents and two kids at home is about in line with what the tickets would cost anyway and you'd be saving a ton on snacks; $50 for two adults to watch the latest Tarantino is a much higher premium to pay for convenience. It might grow the pie overall, however, by bringing in people who would otherwise skip new releases altogether. I can see pretty strong arguments all around.
I do think the effect on the movie viewing experience will be deleterious, however. Christopher Nolan and James Cameron are opposed to it for these reasons. In an email, Cameron and Jon Landau explained why: "For us, from both a creative and financial standpoint, it is essential for movies to be offered exclusively in theaters for their initial release. We don’t understand why the industry would want to provide audiences an incentive to skip the best form to experience the art that we work so hard to create."
Emphasis mine, because that's kind of where I come down on the issue. The problem with home viewing is that people don't really know how to watch stuff at home. If you'll allow me, here's one very brief example from my own experience.
I'd seen Michael Mann's Heat, I dunno, maybe a dozen times at home before catching a screening at the local repertory theater in DC a few years back. And I had always known the you were supposed to listen to the shootouts at normal volume because the gunfire was meant to be loud. But I usually turned the volume down a bit during the shootout at the end—the one on the runway at LAX. And I don't have a surround sound system, so the mix simply came at me from straight ahead, like everything else. Seeing the film—in particular, that last scene—in a theater was revelatory. The whole sequence was much more powerful, much more disconcerting. The lights were blinding, the noises deafening—and, just as importantly, they came at you from all sides. You felt like you were there, at the airport, standing next to Neal and Vincent.
It's simply a different—and better—experience. The problem with home viewing is that most people just don't do it right, either from lack of ability (they don't have the equipment) or lack of care (they set their equipment up incorrectly, leave "motion flow" and other nonsense on, etc.). To say nothing of the fact that home viewing will inevitably lead to a fractured, inattentive experience, the viewer split between film and laptop and phone and conversation.
I understand that I'm hopelessly persnickety in this regard and that my desire to restrict the average moviegoer's choices—for their own good!—is lightly totalitarian. But I don't really care? People should be nudged toward experiencing art correctly, not conveniently.