Future of Media Summit Blog

It's interesting to note that most of the "summer" movies (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) are all being released globally on the same day throughout the world. This is known, in industry parlance, as "day and date" release. It's expensive for the studios - they have to make a lot more prints of the film, at USD $3000 a pop. Then there's the enormous costs of an international marketing campaign. Why do they do it?

It's said that piracy has driven day and date release; that getting a film out globally ruins the market for pirate DVDs of big films. But this is really only true in China - and China is not much of a market for Hollywood. So if piracy isn't the reason, what is?

Attention. Everywhere in the industrialized world, people have more demands - more salient demands - on their attention than ever before. You can't expect someone in Australia, who hears about a huge film release in the US - to care about it six months later. The whole media landscape might be different; certainly there will be some new toy or website or fad that will consume the attentions of the audience.

This is a losing battle. There is no way that any film that's being marketed to two billion people can actually be anything more than light entertainment to the vast majority of them. When you "go wide" - as a good Hollywood screenplay should - you sacrifice depth. And participation in depth is the key feature of 21st-century media. MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are far more engaging than the websites that preceded them, because they both invite and reward that participation.

You can advertise your film on MySpace or YouTube, and generate buzz. But in reality you're only feeding your biggest competitor for audience attentioin, a competitor which is constantly becoming more alluring, more salient, and more powerful.

This is a game the film studios can't win. But they don't know it yet. They're making too much money this summer to care. But it won't last.