Cinema & Distribution
A long time ago movies just used to be shown in cinemas. In 1905 John Harris and Harry Davis opened a movie theater in Pittsburgh. It was called Nickelodeon and it was a charge was 5 cents. It is said the first film to be shown in a cinema was The Great Train Robbery but people argue this claim. Reason being is because it was made before the first cinema was made. By 1915, cinemas screening a full feature length were now a common place.
The world’s first, two screen cinema was in Canada which came in 1957 this was The Elgin Theater in Ottawa it was the first in the world to offer this. Post war there was still your normal brick cinema, the first Drive-Ins (This is where customers would sit in their cars and watch the film). The last of the original Drive-Ins in Canada went dark in 1999, but they have made a comeback a little bit during the 2010’s. They originally started post war so around about 1940’s they became a noticeable.
TV then came along, it was popularized in the early 1950’s, this meant that films had a secondary audience and might be seen again by the original audience and by a brand new audience. Home video was very popular in the 1980’s, which meant a lot of films could be extremely popular without having a cinema release. It was very expensive to buy a video recorder it was around £800 and that would be around £3000 in 2017 money. Even buying a tape to record on was about £100. No one could afford to buy a video recorder up front so they would rent it. There was two formats Beta-max and VHS and they were competing and VHS won due to it being cheaper.
When videos originally came out in VHS format you might have a horror film that’s might not be able to have been shown at the cinema because of its graphical content. The tabloids jumped to conclusions blaming it for murders and any crime possible. This is when the BBFC stepped in and made it law that all film being put onto video must be age rated for the benefit for the viewers.
And now we have the internet which allows us to stream movies legally and illegally. Netflix one of the main big guns for online legal streaming. But it was never this way as when the internet was just a bunch of ones and zeros and it still is. When it was established it was slow but now we are with super-fast internet.
The establishment idea of theatrical window, this the period after a cinema release but before home formats. Theatrical windows are getting more increasingly more complicated. This style of release would give the actor’s time to do talk shows in America when it is released in the summer, and then when it is released in the UK in the winter the actor will be available for interviews. Digital distribution has also changed the way we watch films, this is rather than people having to transfer enormous are expensive prints. This narrows the release for the film in cinemas and DVD release.
The Film MUM & DAD (2008) was the first film to be released in cinema, DVD, Pay-Per-View and Internet download. This was a test to see how it planned out and it mustn’t have worked well, probably why not many people have repeated this.
THE NOTEBOOK (CASE STUDY)
What release pattern did the movie follow?
The original release was at a US film festival called Seattle International Film Festival on the 20th May 2004, and then got an initial cinema in Canada in 25th June 2004. It would be then released the same time in the UK. By the 24th June 2005 it had its last official cinema release in Italy. Its official release date in the US was 20th May 2004 till 25th June 2004. The Notebook was released on DVD on February 8, 2005 and Blu-ray on May 4, 2010. By February 2010, the film had sold over 11 million copies on DVD.
