Classic cinema has a special power that remains relevant: it unites everybody in front of a shared big screen.
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Some months ago I watched „The triangle of Sadness“ by Ruben Östlund^[Triangle_of_Sadness] and had a fascinating experience I seemingly had forgotten: the increasingly crazy plot of Woody Harrelson as alcoholic anti-capitalist cruise boat captain did something to the crowd within the cinema venue - at a certain point many people spontaneously started to look towards the strangers sitting next to them, laughing together in a shared experience. This should not be anything special, but in that moment it felt that way - the movie created a sense of community with strangers.
The public and location-based nature of Cinema has specific economic implications that affect the nature of its content. In the first half of the 20th century, cinema venues replaced funfairs and other forms of location-based public entertainment. In economic terms, movies are an intermediate product, the material needed by Cinemas to sell tickets. The performance of movies is measured by their ability to fill the ranks of a venue - the more tickets are sold, the better. The industry soon discovered, that low-budget movie productions only had limited economic potential, because the fixed costs of cinema venues persist in any case. Therefore, movie production increasingly moved towards higher budgets and the marketing support of famous actors to make sure, that as many people as possible felt the need to watch a certain movie. After a temporary decline of the movie Industrie in the 1950‘s caused by the rise of home entertainment, investments in the attraction of movie content even increased in later years, to differentiate it against competing lower quality offerings in television.^[see the-economic-history-of-the-international-film-industry]
Being relevant to many people of different demographics is at the core of the myth of Cinema and Hollywood - an almost magical ability to create shared excitement, fear and joy across all social divisions for the duration of a movie, in a shared specific location. At the same time, the requirement for universal relevance and acceptance has also limited the diversity of topics that would be covered by movies made for the big screens.
This is the core difference between Cinema and Streaming: going to the movies is a public activity, watching Netflix is something we do in private. Cinema movies are designed to reach a broad audience, it is not a publication for „a target audience of 1“, as many digitally distributed forms of content are today^[see Long Tail Strategy]. The aspiration to be universally appealing and relevant seems a bit old-fashioned today, but I don‘t think it will disappear.
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Last updated: 2023-08-13
%%posted: 2023-08-13%%