After reporting last week about plans to soon equip one-third of American cinemas with digital projectors, I received a few comments telling of disappointing encounters with the new format. It got me wanting to do some more research on the technology and the experience, and hopefully soon take in a digital showing somewhere. I haven't yet become an expert on the subject, but I did come across an interesting set of articles in Sunday's Ventura County Star, both written by Allison Bruce, which give the pros and the cons of both digital and film projectors.

Aside from the obvious factors that make digital attractive -- clearer picture, cheaper distribution -- Bruce includes an amusing comment from director Barry Sonnenfeld in which he says studios could easily change a movie that has been badly received by critics or audiences, after it has opened in theaters. He cites King Kong as a good example of a movie that would have benefited had Universal been able to cut out 40 minutes of the film after hearing that viewers complained of it being too long. I highly doubt that any studios would actually take advantage of this, though. After all, isn't that why they have test screenings?

One thing I think that hurts digital, evident from Bruce's article supporting digital, is that most of the format's pros are beneficial to studios and theaters more than to audiences. The cheaper distribution, the ease of projector use, the issues with piracy and the scheduling ideas for exhibitors are all meant to save the businesses money. But will it trickle down the savings to the consumer? No way. In fact, I see digital being used as an excuse to raise prices for the ticket buyers. Consider that the big theater chains are about to borrow a collective billion dollars. It is obvious that we, the audience, will be depended upon to pay those loans back.

Place your bets, kiddies – somebody at Universal is about to get pink slipped. The studio's King Kong made just $66.2 million from Wednesday through Sunday – a huge disappointment when you consider that The Chronicles of Narnia made about a million dollars more in only three days last week.

Universal, of course, is already running all kinds of spin on this. But-but-but it's three hours long, which means it can't book as many showtimes! (Didn't someone think of that before the thing opened?) But-but-but everyone is too busy Christmas shopping to go to the movies! But-but-but Titanic started slow, too! But-but-but grosses increased 40% from Friday to Saturday! (Well, yeah, but so did Aeon Flux.) But-but-but Kong doesn't have the built-in audience of Lord of the Rings! (Well, yeah, but it also doesn't specifically exclude those of us who chiefly associate "hobbits" with "those guys who never move out of their mother's basement".) But the best quote in the Reuters writeup comes from Box Office Mojo's Brandon Gray. Kong was " realistically, a tough sell," Gray says, because "it's incredibly tricky to get audiences excited about a movie that doesn't have a strong human character." Zing!

It takes only a glance at the rest of the Top Ten to see that Universal's claim that we were all too busy scooping up presents to hit the cinemas is all wrong. Narnia, for instance, held on steady, coming in at number 2 with $31.7 million, and Fox's The Family Stone slightly outdid expectations, earning $12.7 million and landing in third place. So what went wrong here? And will Kong come back from behind to, at the very least, pay off the Big Fake Gorilla's outstanding debts? Full top ten after the jump, and for more detailed figures, try this.

I think I love Spike Lee. First he comes out as a soccer fan, and now he's taking Hollywood to task for making awful movies. At the Venice Film Festival supporting All the Invisible Children, which he co-directed, Lee was asked about the massive slump that has the American film industry in such a panic. Instead of talking about DVD releases, advertising costs, or fickle viewers, he put the blame squarely at the feet of filmmakers, accusing them of a total lack of originality. "I'm not naming any individual films but it's the worst it's ever been. It's full of sequels and remakes of TV shows." Remember when Spike was the enfant terrible, accused of inciting riots and creating race problems? Now he seems like the only major filmmaker with any brains.

 
You think?

It's the Los Angeles Times' turn to sit in the box-office-slump hand-wringing circle, and this week they're bringing one new (well, maybe not "new", but seldom discussed) platter to the party: us! John Horn and Rachel Abramowitz point out that even if a studio dumps kabillions on marketing to get the easily-led flock into the theaters, "bad buzz ... can now be passed with viral speed on the Internet."

So essentially, you little scamps start running your mouths (er, fingers), and no matter how much a pre-ordained blockbuster makes on Friday night, you (and me, we, us) have the ability to throw a wrench in first-weekend grosses. After that, it's all over. The article quotes Lucy Fisher, who produced Bewitched: "Now at midnight on Friday evening, you're dead or alive. However long it took to make the movie, by Friday night, except for Academy[-Award-type] movies, your fate gets cast."

Horn and Abramowitz conclude with an ominous bit of gloom-mongering: War of the Worlds may be the summer box office's last, great hope, but still, "it would need to be almost a Titanic-size hit to make up the lost ground." Is it a surprise, then, that they're doing virtually zero pre-screening?

More on the AMC Loews merger: Though it's going to be "structured as a merger", AMC obviously has the upper hand, and the deal may be a big arrow pointing to their return to the market as a public offering. Oddly, the stock price of new company's biggest competition, the even larger Regal chain, actually went up 16 cents the day of the announcement. Dick Westerling, a Regal vice president, even applauded the merger announcement, telling Variety, "Consolidation is a good strategy in this industry." And ultimately, the speculators are speculating that having another mega-exhib around will likely force studios to share more of their profits with theaters. If they ever again have profits to share, that is.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith has earned just $9.7 million in Italy in five weeks of release. That's pretty bad, and it's indicative of an all-around drop of almost 18% in Italian box office receipts from January to June of this year. Apparently, all of Europe is suffering, but Italian grosses have been particularly bad. The local exhibition industry chalks the problem up to several factors: a little bit of piracy, a little bit of great weather, a little bit of sluggish economy. But it seems the most urgent factor would have to be the lack of regulation on the Italian home video market, which allows for the release of (non-counterfeit) DVDs whilst the representative film is showing in theaters. That's insane, right?

Finally, a box office story with a non-whiny, perceptively critical angle: "The gaps between [the box office returns of] '05 and 2004 are evidence of a fundamental shift in the way Americans consume movies," writes Gabriel Snyder in Variety. Essentially, Snyder argues, audiences are showing moviemakers that there's no longer any such thing as a "safe bet". If a film like Passion of the Christ can skew an entire year's box office record, propelled almost entirely by non-regular moviegoers, yet even the final Star Wars film can't manage more than a couple of weeks in the number one slot, it's all a sign that "blockbusters can materialize out of nowhere, [and] sometimes "sure things" fail to click." So what do studios do? Well, for one thing, they can stop complaining about year-to-year grosses; Snyder points out that when you launch a film like Monster-in-Law exactly one year after the opening of a film like Troy, even if the girl-skewing romantic comedy does better than expected (and it did), it doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict that the middle-brow action epic is going to set a gross mark that is hard for a much smaller film to exceed. But, on the whole, "though on percentage terms the summer looks like it's very soft, the difference is fairly small in blockbuster terms."

It's now clear that the big story of the summer movie season has nothing to do with the movies people are going to see - it's that fewer and fewer people are going to see movies at all, and from Sharon Waxman to the Associated Press, everyone's speculating about what's keeping people away from the theaters. But here at Cinematical, we speculate all day long, so we're foisting the work on this one on you. Tell us in the comments - are you going to the movies less often than you used to, and, if so, why? What's keeping you at home? Ticket prices, or pain-in-the-ass fellow theater patrons? Crappy movies, or your awesome home theater system? Let's do it.