Since Monday I’ve had a minimized Firefox window open in my dock, with this THR story about the rotation of services between Technicolor and Deluxe. I’ve been putting off writing about it, but today when I noticed Ebert tweeted a similar Variety story (that apparently beat THR) I figured it was time to take a look and get it out there.
For years now we’ve hard about the decline of film and the ascendancy of digital in both the capture and exhibition fields of the industry. The arguments against the death of film seem positively quaint these days, as new sensors and cameras from companies like RED and Alexa [sorry guys, ARRI is the company and “Alexa” is the new blowjob of a camera- dumb mistake!] keep making converts of even the most entrenched filmmakers. If film seemed to dwindle without too much of a fight in the capture arena though (something like half of features shot across the world are now digital), that’s to say nothing of projection, where it has very quickly become a digital projector’s game. 3D helped push this along faster, but the easier distribution methods for the studios spelled out the inevitability of the shift long ago. Currently North American screens sit at about half-digital/half-film projection, and that number will only lean further towards the former as time goes on.
But these are all statistics that have been reported on for years and death knells that have been hyped by plenty– it’s the more subtle background signs that really show you what’s happening. You may not hear about it on the front page, but when the big guns in the photochemical world start massively restructuring their business model, and trading business…
Basically it boils down to this: Deluxe and Technicolor are the two big boys in the photochemical film printing game, meaning that when movies need the thousands of prints made for a wide release, these guys do that manufacturing. Granted, this is only a small part of the business of each company (they offer color mastering services, archiving, digital production packages, that sort of thing…), but now that demand for film prints has shrunk so much in North America and to a less dramatic extent, Europe, the two rivals have made a deal. Essentially they’ll be hiring each other and trading off printing business so that Technicolor will no longer strike 35mm prints for North America, while Deluxe will no longer handle the physical distribution (shipping/trucking) of prints in North America. This basically means the two companies are ceding one part of the pipeline to each other, dropping the competition, and simplifying their overall operations. Writing on the wall: they’re agreeing to carve up what little profits remain peacefully, rather than competing themselves out of any revenue at all.
Naturally this comes with some job losses, and the story gets more complicated outside of North America where Technicolor is essentially taking over printing in the U.K. and Thailand. Neither company is particularly bashful about pointing to digital technology as the reason for the changes to their not-even-100-year-old-models…
“Today’s agreement with Technicolor is the result of significant changes in our industry enabled by new digital technologies causing the rapid transition from film to digital,” said Cyril Drabinsky, president and CEO of Deluxe. “This agreement will help maintain a high consistency of service for our customers through the remaining life of film.”
It is nice to note that Technicolor will be retaining their 65/70mm print arm (sweet, delicious real IMAX) though moving it to a new facility.
So what’s this mean to you? Little, unless you’re one of a few hundred losing their jobs. Your theater experience has likely already undergone the shifts that have caused this, and if not… it will soon. Beautiful digital cinematography is accomplished everyday, and film won’t be 100% fully retired until we really have moved all the way past it, so don’t shed too many tears.
If there’s anything to cry over, it’s that one day we may lose the experience of those revival screenings with terribly beat-up, charming leftover prints of old films. The 80s horror flicks and underground nasties. The thing is though… I’ve seen how a classic like The Exorcist looks when it has been digitized as a high-quality, restored digi-print, and I must say that’s a future I’m not too scared of.
Film’s not gone, but its days are numbered. It’s taken us a long way, so at the very least its passing should be observed with respect, but with a hopeful eye towards the future of the tools that empower filmmakers to bring us so much joy.
6 comments
Considering 8000-12000 line resolution cameras are all ready being manufactured/developed by RED et al. I’d say the IMAX 70mm wing will soon be clipped too, it’s expensive and cumbersome. I wouldn’t bemoan the days of seeing a beat-up print as some old films only have beat-up copies with which to make future transfers.
I’m a manager at a Regal that’s half film/half digital (well, it’s actually 60/40 right now), and the full switchover to digital for us can’t come soon enough, as having both has been a complete pain in the ass for scheduling and dealing with sold out shows. Our 4 biggest auditoriums have been converted, but often, those are not our 4 biggest films. Over the holidays this last winter, True grit and Little Fockers were regularly selling out in our 5th and 6th biggest theaters (each with about a hundred seats each) while Tron was taking up space in our largest theater but doing half the business of either of those other films. Narnia and Yogi Bear were taking up prime real estate as well. When everything was film, we could banish the duds or older films that we now might only have digital prints of to wherever we wanted them to go. We should have never had to show My Soul to Take in anything larger than the janitor’s closet.
That was one of the coolest, most informative posts I’ve seen on here. Cool information. I feel like I learned something today. Bonus: I’m not being sarcastic.
Thanks for that.
Agreed with Lucidz, good to get a little insight on the local theater’s perspective on the transition.
Thanks! Here’s a link to an article by Devin a couple of years ago that irritated me to no end.
/22000/five-ways-to-improve-the-theatrical-experience/
As someone that manages a regular theater in the ‘burbs, the suggestions have no basis in reality whatsoever. It basically amounts to “This is what they do at the Alamo Drafthouse, so fuck if you don’t try to be like them”. While I’m sure that it’s a wonderful place that I’d really like to visit someday, as both a moviegoer and someone that wants to see how other theaters tick, it’s really not something that the smaller fish in the bigger ponds (we’re in a small market in a huge chain) can even hope to aspire to, as we’re lucky to just get thrown scraps. For some reason, around the time we started converting to digital, we also got different seats in our theaters (that’s different, not new, as they were hand-me-downs), and in most of our auditoriums, they were just a liiiiiiiiittle wider than the old ones, so we were forced to shorten some of our rows, losing as many as 40-50 seats in some auditoriums. High start-up costs for new gear + fewer available seats = even that much more time before the company thinks we can afford to go fully digital. Last I heard, we’re still a year away from that, and who knows what all the bigger guys will be on to by then.
AMC says they’ll be completely digital by the end of next year.
I wish it was by the end of last week.
On Saturday I saw Harry Potter 7 part 2 (for the first time, and also I haven’t read the books) at the local, huge-ass AMC. It was in 2D, so of course it was a 35mm print and not a digital projection. Not to spoil anything, but literally a second before Voldemort says “come to die” there was one of those projection fuck-ups where the audio keeps going, uninterrupted, but the picture cuts completely to black for a few moments and then comes back, almost as if someone in the booth had been blocking out the light. That was annoying enough, but over the next couple minutes this happened a grand total of FIVE TIMES!!!! I was sitting in the very back row with my friends and I definitely noticed some people leaving to go complain. I don’t know what the hell was going on in that booth. I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt that the projectionist was trying to avert some kind of celluloid disaster, but fuck was that annoying.
My whole point is that digital projection eliminates problems like this. Later that night I saw what ended up being (to my delight) a digital projection of Horrible Bosses. It’s just that with movies like HP7part2, where both the studio and the theater see the $$$$ of 3D post-conversion, they’re not gonna throw away one of their precious digital screens on the 2D version when they could be making four dollars more per ticket.
I should point out that I’m a fan of seeing things in 3D as long as they were shot that way. The 20% of TF3 that was post-converted was my first experience with the process and I did not like what I saw.
As for traditional 2D films, just about every movie made these days goes through digital intermediate regardless of how it was shot, so watching new releases on celluloid really is outdated at this point.
All of this is to say that when I pay 11.50 for a regular ‘ol 35mm screening, I expect projection fuck-ups like the one I experienced on Saturday to simply not happen.
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