HOWZAT

Now let’s take a quick look at the history of cinema in this country. There’s no doubt that cinema at one time was king of the entertainments. Admissions in the UK reached an all time high of 1.6 billion – that’s 1,600 million admissions – in 1946.

With the advent of television, cinema admissions plummeted to less than 300 million by the mid-1960s, a fall of 80 per cent. Admissions continued their steady decline through the Eighties to about 54 million. A mere 3 per cent of what they were in 1946. I remember speaking to Ed Shilton, head of Rank Entertainment at the time, about spending more money to spruce up his rapidly declining cinemas. He said he would not want to waste the money. He would rather have converted all [his] cinemas to bingo halls.

Since that time, the cinema industry has slowly crept back, with the help of new investment and the multiplex, to about 200 million admissions a year, still only 12 percent of that 1946 number. Looking at the figures, one could easily argue that the home long ago became the cinema, and that the best cinema operators can do from now on is just to hold their own.

They’re not competing just against home entertainment, they are competing with other leisure outside of home activities, including sporting events, theatre, concerts, theme parks and gambling, a monster business still growing and sucking up a great deal of the public’s disposable income.

Cinema is not expensive when compared to other leisure activities, thus we are competing for a share of the public’s time, rather than just their money. But home cinema is not immune from competition either. It must compete with other leisure activities done in the home. In addition to TV, there are computer games - this year software sales for computer games exceeded the box office sales in the United States - and there is also online gambling.

If cinema is to survive, how might it be different in the future? If film is to survive, how will it have to be different in the future? Exploring these questions, let’s look ahead 10 years and make the following assumptions: technology proceeds apace, so that film stock has disappeared, and the entire process from camera to projection is digital. This will give cinema venues of tomorrow much more flexibility. They may become arenas so that film is only part of their programming. On the other hand, we assume that high definition [television] will penetrate the home market and will become affordable to a large segment of the public. How will cost, size and spectacle of filmmaking be impacted by these changes? Can home cinema alone support the high cost of the Hollywood spectacle, about one-third of which are made in this country? And how will distribution and marketing costs be affected?

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