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Jesus Escobedo

Professor Christopher Herrera

RWS-1302-024

2 April 2021

The Present & Future of The Film Industry

Nowadays, the film Industry is one of the fastest growing industries around the world, it

is well known that the thing that drives this industry the most is the same thing that drives the

majority of industries on the present day, money. The amount of income that is generated by

movie productions makes for one of the most competitive art forms in the present. The success

of the industry is not new at all, this medium has been a major form of entertainment since its

beginnings on the World War. We have seen the evolution of this industry in many ways; from

soundless to sound, from black and white to color, and other advances primarily on high

resolution. However, we are now, experiencing one of the most important changes in a long

period of time.

The last year started as a different year for everyone on the planet, the Coronavirus

spread everywhere causing governments from the whole world to call this a pandemic and start

a forced quarantine. This entire time movie theaters have been forgotten and left behind while

we could only watch movies from our home, nevertheless this is not only because of the

pandemic. Movie theaters have not had the best years in this past decade. As receptors of this

content, we like to fulfill our wishes while watching our favorite movies. Nowadays we can see

movie theaters with a lot of different choices like normal rooms, VIP rooms, IMAX screens,

3D movies, and even 4D. But it seems that these changes are still not the best for people’s
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comfort. In the last years, streaming platforms have taken over with such a powerful impact,

being able to watch brand new movies from our comfortable living rooms is a great advantage,

but on the other side, for many, the experience of watching a film from the movie theater, with

public reacting and snacks from the theater store seems hard to compare, so there can be two

outlets, the one where the industry grows creating more opportunities for people in this field,

and the other one where due to streaming platforms, movie theaters collapse with time and

eventually get closed.

How has the film industry changed in the past few years?

As a young adult I can remember the early days when I used to go to my closest

Blockbuster with my family and rent movies on a VHS format for two days, then that evolved

to the time where I could go to any supermarket and buy movies with the slight difference that

they were now on a CD format, and now I only have to get up, walk to the living room, turn on

the Tv and pick the movie I want to watch with my subscription on a streaming service or

maybe rent it online. Even though this are personal experiences, I do not consider them to be

only mine, we can make the assumption that there are many people that have lived this same

thing. We had to go through all this changes to understand what a digital revolution is like,

Steven Ascher said back in 2009 that when movies are “Once in digital form, a world of

possibilities opens up” (3), and that was exactly what happened, a whole pack of different

media resources got transformed into digital content and opened a way for different ideas and

points of view that led media, but more specifically the film industry to find a way through

something that did not seem as a possibility a long time ago, and this revolution started in 2007

when the company Netflix was created.

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It was back in 2012 when Netflix’s streaming platform arrived and became available for

people all around the globe. Within a few years Netflix became one of the most growing

companies of the film industry with this innovating concept of a service that has a monthly

subscription to watch a long list of movies and Tv shows from your home. As this company

grew, it evolved to a production company, where they could now create their own content and

draw the attention of more people. Not so much time had to pass for this to encourage other

companies to create their own streaming platforms like Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney plus and

more recently HBO Max.

Due to the success of streaming platforms the competition for the top (still held by

Netflix) has increased, major movie companies had to provide more resources for their

different projects on streaming platforms and therefore gave a lot more money to improve their

productions and compete on the market. Even though streaming platforms seemed such a great

idea and worked wonderfully for companies and public, there is one big problem that has

chased the industry since the early days.

Piracy is one of the biggest threats of the film industry. Nowadays we can go online and

look up pages that contain thousands of movies without their streaming rights, this although it

may not seem like it, causes a huge loss for film production studios, who according to Annlee

Ellingson loose up to six billion dollars a year, and with more content on streaming platforms,

and more time with people stuck quarantining, this number is most likely to increase rather than

decrease.

While we can see that this change of the movie market has been drastic from the

perspective of a viewer, the change for someone that has worked, works, or wants to work on

the film industry may be twice as much as ours. With the evolution of the past years, ideals
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now are different, goals change, but most importantly, the amount of income generated is

higher and therefore opportunities are opened for people competing, which can lead to both

good and bad things.

Does the increase of opportunities improve the industry?

For a long period of time the film industry has been growing in a lot of ways, but this

time we need to focus on the creative area. It is important to understand that for filmmakers to

find a place in this particular industry the competition is different. Graduating from a nice film

school or from a high ranked college is not something that can lead you to a wide-open range of

opportunities as it is with other professional areas. The most important asset to have as a

creator is talent, talent isn’t something we acquire in a college or by taking a film class, talent

doesn’t have a specific way for people to get it, and companies involved on the film industry

look particularly for this asset. There is a lot undiscovered talent on the film world, however a

giant amount of luck plays this game as well, as well as talent it is important to find people and

create contacts that are involved on the industry, this makes the opportunity for someone higher

to be able to work on this world, and as seen before in the last few years opportunities have

increase in an important number, but it does not necessarily mean that having more people

working increases the quality of the work.

With the expansion of the industry many companies are now able to invest in projects

that they would never even consider to on the last years, their bets go now to captivate different

audiences with different content that different filmmakers pitch to producers. These new

innovating projects fulfill the objective of entertaining and many times go further and deeper on

the audience and critics, however even though many times they perform well, a lot of the times

they don’t, we as audience end up watching mediocre films that don’t seem to have the
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required levels of pre-production, production or post-production, and this makes companies

look pretty bad in many senses, which concludes on bad and harsh criticism from acclaimed

magazines but also from people involved on the industry, an example of this is a survey that

Stephen Follows did to 363 people involved on film making, the las year when quarantine was

at its peak and a lot of films were coming out on streaming, he concluded that “of those

working in Home Entertainment, with two-thirds believing cinema-going won’t regain its

former glory” (4).

To be able to say if weather or not the growth of the film industry makes it better or not

is not simple at all, sometimes it is a matter of perspective and putting ourselves in every point

of view there is, for us as audience the more we get may be better than to receive very little

content, because then it would be obvious that our choices of films to watch on a casual

evening would be more and we would be more pleased, but then there are many chances of

choosing something that may not be appealing for us, so as receptor even though we would like

every movie to be better than the last one, we would also have on our billboard challenging

choices. Now for film makers it is harder to tell what is better, because acclaimed creators

would most likely want to keep the essence of the industry as they remember it many years ago,

but for new creators, opportunities being bigger every time is something like a dream getting

closer to come true

How does the future look for the film industry?

Even though we know that the revolution on the film industry began on the last decade,

this last year meant a lot more for the film making environment, after the biggest movie

company on the industry Disney studios announced that many movies that were supposed to be

premiered in theaters that year, now were going to be launched directly to Disney plus, and
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after Warner Brothers announced at the end of the year that after Christopher Nolan’s TENET

unsuccessful performance on theaters, all of their releases were now going to be launched on

movie theaters and directly to HBO Max who is in charge of their content in streaming, the

speculation was bigger than ever, in a podcast about this issue right after Warner Brothers made

this announcement John Horn mentioned that “Movie theaters are about to go out of business”

and that “the pandemic has accelerated what was inevitable” (min.1). In another podcast

around the same topic hosted by Alysa Chang, and attending as a special guest Bob Mondello,

they argue about the release of Wonder Woman 1984 in movie theaters and its low income at

the time and Mondello expressed that the problem didn’t only lied on the releases in streaming

services or that people were not comfortable about attending to a public and closed space, but

that “it's that the social distancing protocols so radically reduce the theater's capacity that they

can't make money” (min. 2).

So we now know, that people that are considered to be expert on the film business,

believe this years to be the end or at least the downfall of movie theaters, however, there is

another side that has not been covered, people that are working the film industry as creators,

like actors, writers and directors may have a different point of view. To start with, in a Full

Actors roundtable brought by The Hollywood Reporter, Gary Oldman addresses the issue

saying that he enjoys the streaming services as well as anybody else, but when his last movie

Mank premiered on Netflix he went to see it on a theater with eleven people and said that

“something about being in this big space, a dark room, watching something forty feet across,

made it play faster”, making clear that not only as an artist but as audience he believed in the

idea of movie theaters. In another discussion between directors talking about conveniences of

streaming platforms, writer and director Aaron Sorkin mention that without keeping in mind
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the sound and visual aspect of a movie theater that makes a movie better “The audience

experience has no substitute” (min. 42). Therefore, this makes clear that creators embrace the

idea of movie theaters and like to make their movies believing it is going to launch on them.

In a general matter the film industry is too complicated, we can say that streaming

platform are the present and will be the future of movie making, but film makers seem to

embrace and not let go the idea of movie theaters, and even though the final word is not of the

directors or writers, the do have a say in this issue. With this being addressed, we can see the

future of film making as an opened way with opportunities for people seeking a place on the

industry, mediocre films and piracy may grow in the next years, but as viewers we seem to like

our choices to be open for us to choose. Film has a lot of future and does not seem to have even

scratch the surface of its potential.

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Works Cited

Ellingson, Annlee. "Piracy Threatens the Future of the Film Industry." The Film Industry,

edited by Roman Espejo, Greenhaven Press, 2009. Opposing Viewpoints. Gale In

Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010662222/OVIC?

u=txshracd2603&sid=OVIC&xid=5b8d9346. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021. Originally

published as "The Piracy Problem: A 3-Part Series: Part 1," Boxoffice, vol. 143, 2007,

pp. 39-45.

Ascher, Steven. "Digital Movies Are the Future of the Film Industry." The Film Industry,

edited by Roman Espejo, Greenhaven Press, 2009. Opposing Viewpoints. Gale In

Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010662224/OVIC?

u=txshracd2603&sid=OVIC&xid=b32e9c82. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021. Originally

published as "The Digital Revolution," eJournalUSA, 2007.

"Preface to 'What Is the Future of the Film Industry?'." The Film Industry, edited by Roman

Espejo, Greenhaven Press, 2009. Opposing Viewpoints. Gale In Context: Opposing

Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010662105/OVIC?

u=txshracd2603&sid=OVIC&xid=cd2d0527. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021.

"What Will The Film Industry Look Like Post COVID-19 Pandemic?" Morning Edition, 21

Dec. 2020. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,

link.gale.com/apps/doc/A646115303/OVIC?

u=txshracd2603&sid=OVIC&xid=72599a18. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021.

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"What 2020 Was Like For The Movie Industry." All Things Considered, 29 Dec. 2020. Gale In

Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A647084156/OVIC?

u=txshracd2603&sid=OVIC&xid=f56c144d. Accessed 11 Apr. 2021.

Affleck Ben, Delroy Lindo, Oldman Gary, Washington David, Baron Sasha, Yeun Steven.

”FULL Actors Roundtable”. The Hollywood Reporter, Mar 1 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZYBCHLIKPc

Fincher David, Sorkin Aaron, Zhao Chloe, Greengrass Paul, Lee Spike, King Regina. “Six

directors tackle the idea (or is it a myth?) of controlling a film set”. LA Times, Jan 26

2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPcD7lL5zMs

Follows Stephen. “Survey: What does the film industry think is the future of exhibition?”.

STEPHEN FOLLOWS, May 24 2020. https://stephenfollows.com/film-industry-survey-

on-post-covid-future/