MPAA undercuts cinema distrubution

I read this story yesterday on Deadline Hollywood and was thinking about the implications. The studios are going to basically bypass the theaters. It probably won't destroy the dating segment of the audience, since those people want to get out of the house anyway, but I could see a lot of families foregoing having to get the kids dressed and piled into the SUV to go to the movies and spending $30 on tickets and $40 on popcorn and drinks. Wow! All those lucrative weekend matinees of children's films would be gone.

Likewise, the over-40 crowd wouldn't have to put up with people talking on their cell phones during the movie, eating smelly pizza, sloshing Pepsi on the floor, and kicking the backs of their chairs.

And, I've got to say, I'd rather watch a non-tentpole movie at home than having to drive 12-miles to see it on a decent-sized screen!

Wow! Count me out. If it's worth seeing, it's worth seeing right -- in a movie palace with a giant screen and sound, with the buzz of the audience, and a bag of popcorn and drink. The big problem for me is that Hollywood hasn't exactly been churning out "must see" movies the past few years...

disgusting !

It's agreed that MPAA has undercut theatre movie distributions, which is disgusting and destructive, not to mention a form of piracy in itself, imho. As a cinephile who still enjoys going to great, older movies as well as some new ones, I will not be driven away.

So now the MPAA wants to kill off the movie theater. Nice. Why, so with the decline in profits they complain that its all the fault of movie pirates?

Once you bypass the movie theatre you no longer have a movie... you have a TV show. Would Ben-Hur's incredible chariot race have made a dent in the public's conscience if the film had debuted on television? We all know the answer to that. How about 2001 on the Cinerama screen? Seen at home, even on a hi-def 50" screen - it doesn't impress. And what about the Oscars? How do they figure out which feature length programs get nominated for Academy Awards? Wouldn't they all just get lumped together into the Emmys?

What's going on? Why try to kill off the moviegoing experience? Can't anyone wait for more than the 3 or 4 months it generally takes for a movie to end up as a DVD or Blu-ray? What's going on here? Anybody know?

And if the studios have their way, that "3 or 4 months" could shrink to a few weeks or even less. Sony wanted DVDs of the Michael Jackson documentary "This is It" in stores for Christmas and only backed down after massive theater-owner protest. Recently, theater owners in France shut their theaters down briefly in protest of the shrinking release-to-DVD windows, and there has been talk of making some new releases concurrent with theatrical releases as premium computer downloads.