Many thought the rapid rise of DVD would sound the death knell of cinemagoing - but is this really the case? Tony Keily reports on the troubled present and uncertain future of Cinema and DVD Video.

Melt down
The steady climb in Box Office attendances in most parts of the world from the mid-80s to the turn of the millennium seemed to many a case of film yielding to entertainment. Screens were increasingly situated in multiplexes providing parking, food, lounge areas, ancillary purchase options (such as Film Ireland magazine): family-friendly heated capsules where you could leave your adolescent for a couple of hours of safe consumer grazing. The films that fed screen space were typically made, marketed and distributed world-wide by the Hollywood Majors, ‘event’ movies shoehorned into place by obedient press and television coverage conducted by product-placement experts who had long since given up any aspiration to be, in any real sense, ‘critics’. In a given year, Titanic and Godzilla or their equivalents would finish roughly first and fifth in the US, in Egypt, in Singapore and in Holland. Rogue Nations such as India or South Korea might buck the trend, but the trend was what counted.

In the new millennium, Box Office takings started to level out or even fall, while the cost of an average Hollywood event movie reached $100 million in production, plus another $60 million in P and A. But the bad economics didn’t really matter because of the DVD boom. Revenues from DVD sales and rentals flooded Hollywood with cash in the late 90s, bringing in four, five, or even six times the cash generated annually by theatrical releases.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 108.