| Look at it this way: Throughout history, there have been things that were hard to do: create a picture that looked like a landscape, create a complex piece of music from nothing, give somebody a ride 20 miles to the next town, correspond with somebody halfway around the world. During this time, it was very common for people to come and pay just for the experience of the event, which was , in some cases, truly magical. Open-air powered carriages? Who wouldn't pay a lot of money to see and ride in one for a few minutes? A room with a few painted landscapes from far-off shores? It's a cultural event. People and companies paid lots of money to increase the spectacle and social attractiveness of these experiences. Not only could you hear a collection of a dozen stringed instruments play, you could do so in the presence of a duke! This is exactly where Hollywood is today. They're doing their damnedest to prevent the inevitable slide into commoditization that has occurred with every other art form and experience. The market eliminates inefficiencies. Today I can see pictures of just about anywhere in the world for nothing. I can listen to hundreds of instruments play -- any one of tens of thousands of songs -- for free. I can travel in luxury in a modern vehicle owned by my neighbor, while doing all of these other things, to the nearest town for pennies. So the question isn't "how do you make these multi-million dollar cultural phenomenons". That's like asking "Who will be the next Beethoven?" Beethoven's dead, and the symphony, while it lives on as a cultural phenomenon, is no longer the primary means of consuming music. So there's your answer: movies will no longer be the primary means of consuming long-form audio-visual entertainment. They will continue to exist for a long period of time just as the symphony does, and the experience of being with the actors and director for a first showing in a glitzy theater will probably never go away, but the bits and bytes of the thing will have virtually no value at all. Things change. That's just life. Always been like this. |