The film business

Rich pickings for the sharks

The author argues that a film’s theatrical run is little more than a marketing campaign for the subsequent release of DVDs and TV broadcasts, where the real money is to be made. Cinemas become less and less important as piracy and digital distribution eat away at Hollywood’s “windows”: the time that separates the appearance of a film in cinemas from its arrival on DVD and pay-TV. Eventually, Mr Epstein predicts, studios will release films almost concurrently in all formats. Executives have “as much chance of reversing the secular shift of audiences from the theatre to the home as King Canute had in commanding the tide to recede.”