Daniel Crooke, here. In one corner: art house cinemas, regional and independent theater chains, and the flickering hope that sitting in a dark room while watching strangers’ problems projected onto a screen will warm you from the inside out. In the other: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Peter Jackson, Justin Timberlake in The Social Network and the redheaded squirt from The Andy Griffith Show. Somewhere beyond the ropes, off in the stands, or wherever spectators chill in a sports metaphor: you, the audience, wondering how the hell you can just lean back and watch a damn movie. The fight: whether Sean Parker’s in-home moviegoing composite, Screening Room – which offers the chance to stream day-in-date releases of top shelf studio releases in the comfort of your own home – accessibly accessorizes or fundamentally destroys movies as we know, watch, and profit from them. Is it a forward thinking, easy-making application or Napster’s file sharing, older sister with a Friedkin poster on the wall? A brave new venture or a brave new world?
Doomsday scenarios and potential benefits after the jump...
While the urge to waltz into the Arclight with my snobby kitty on opening weekend remains DEFCON Tabby – and this service offers at least a partial Xerox of that experience, cozy in your natural surroundings and sans traffic on Sunset Blvd. – the Screening Room proposal calls into question the experiential and bottom line components of going to the cinema as an art and industry. For an introductory fee of $150, which sets up the software platform, Screening Room proposes to shell out new releases via stream for $50. Currently scouting investors in Hollywood – with the aforementioned bigwigs already holding stake or lending vocal support – Screening Room aims to revolutionize the way we ingest the moving image.
Questions arise. When you swap out the communal lights dim, shut up experience for an open environment of endless distraction, one wonders what happens next. There’s a class issue involved. While those prices may seem low to some, others couldn’t conceive of access on these price lines when a week’s lunches are on the line. At the same time, if you can afford it, why not smoke ‘em if you got ‘em or split the cost with friends? The difference between a 65” flatscreen and a micro-desktop hooked up to a Blu-Ray player are vast – a point that big screen broad strokers Christopher Nolan and James Cameron, opponents of the device, may likely sympathize with. But who hasn’t watched Aguirre, The Wrath of God on their laptop?
The Art House Convergence wonders whether bars could effectively buy into and become cinemas, and how this may accelerate online piracy. But is this legal and illegal proliferation inevitable and, to some extent, already happening? There are cases for why this both increases or decreases the likelihood of further Metrographs. Above all else: how do you stay off your smart phone without the (good kind of) peer pressure to activate Airplane Mode?
Is the opportunity to watch Rogue One from the comfort of your own couch worth it, or is there a reason we go to movie theaters in the first place?