Special: Windows in the movies
The children of today, who are born almost drowned in the media, have no idea that there was a time when, for watching a movie, it was necessary to go to the theater. This transition occurred in the last fifty years, and not always happened in a peaceful way. An indicator of these battles is the time delay between the release of film at the cinema and other medias, commonly called “window”.
The Seventh Art is the younger sister of the arts, and has little more than a century, since the Lumière brothers made the public presentation on December 28, 1895, considered the official launch of cinema, at the Grand Café in Paris.
The news crossed the Atlantic, and found, in the United States, the ideal combination of industry and consumer market, first in New York, and subsequently settling in California, at the mythical Hollywood.
For a long time the movies industry reigned in peace, producing, distributing and exhibiting films around the world. Here in Brazil, until the early ’70s, almost every town had at least one movie theater, while in the capitals, the count could come by dozens, all situated in the streets and squares.
The most common feature of these theaters was to have a lot of places, no luxury (only the main theaters had air conditioning, for example), and, most importantly, very cheap tickets. That was the main reason for the slogan “Cinema is the best fun.”
The distribution was also peaceful. A blockbuster could take years to come, being shown primarily in big cities like Rio, Sao Paulo, Recife, Belo Horizonte, and progressively moving to smaller cities.
As copies were physical, and not always handled properly, when a movie arrived to a small town, in some isolated corner, usually presented scratches in the image, and constant breaks during exhibition. Even so, the film would take years for circulating this country.
By the late ’60s, television does not present any risk to cinema. Confined to big cities, it was transmitted through repeaters, filled with the image of “drizzle”, and a lot of times it was “off the air.”
With the improvement of Brazilian communication system, television invaded the country, with the famous “transmissions via Embratel, throughout Brazil”. But, it was only with the arrival of color broadcasting that the exhibition of films on TV started to become important.
The window between theatrical release and arriving on television was still absurdly long. To get an idea, one of the first color film shown nationally in 1973 was “Around the World in 80 Days”, starring David Niven and Cantinflas, produced in 1956.
The first big change came in the early 80s, with the popularization of the VCR. For the first time, the viewer did not have to wait years to review a movie shown in a theater, by simply searching the nearest video store.
If television had greatly disturbed the cinema, the arrival of the VCR was a real knockout, causing the precipitous decline of the cinema spectators, and the resulting closure of many traditional rooms.
To survive, the movie industry had to adapt, and it joined its new competitors, TV and VCR. A new movie should follow a trajectory of media, being shown first in theaters, now smaller and concentrated in malls.
The following steps would be the video release for rent (RENTAL), on cable channels, and finally on broadcast TV. With the arrival of DVD, a new phase was entered, the release for sale directly to consumers (SELL THROUGH), usually in department stores.
It was common for a movie to be released on DVD in the United States while it was still in theaters in Brazil, because markets were sealed, and there was practically no interference between them.
With these steps of distribution spread over time windows, it was possible to guarantee a good income for each consumer share of public. All would be well for the industry, unless a new threat, caused by the arrival of the faster Internet, and the digitalization of media.
If, before, the movie industry could afford the luxury of releasing a movie on different dates around the world, this reality was changed overnight. With the skyrocketing trading movies online, exhibitors saw, astonished, the film is available on the network hours after the U.S. debut.
As with the music industry, the first reaction was to try to block traffic on the Internet. Some successes were achieved, as the closure of the site Megaupload and similars, however, it is virtually impossible to block the sharing of files using torrent programs, or P2P.
This led the industry to understand that cinema is also global, so the windows between the releases had to be shortened, as well promoting world premieres, to the most important titles.
The idea of the pirate with a camera inside the theater is a picture of the past. Most movies that circulate on the Internet are made from digital copies, often extracted from promotional DVD.
With great difficulty, the movie industry is becoming more dynamic, transforming theaters into movie outdoors, with a film exhibition of only one or two weeks, and the big profits are done with the built-in merchandising, and with DVD and Blu-ray copies to the domestic market.
The future, curiously, may depend on the increase in Internet speed, allowing the elimination of physical media, so that the viewer can watch the film debut at his home, by streaming, without having to “download”, and paying a symbolic value, like Netflix services. This release may even be simultaneous with the film in the theaters, reducing to zero the famous “window.”