A sick industry in a sick world

What is Hollywood doing to adapt to a new world where you can rent a movie for $1-$3 but you have to pay $8 per person (give or take a buck) to see it during prime dinner date time? And let's not even talk about the fact that anyone who wants to poke around a bit can probably find a foreign-based site, if not a US-based one, where it's possible to download movies. Today's broadband speeds make downloading entire movies a lot more practical than it used to be.

At the same time, the people who download free movies don't seem to be thinking about the impact they are having on an industry where blockbusters cost many tens or millions of dollars to produce. If a dubious case can be made for file sharing music files, none can be made for file sharing any movie that's not in the public domain.

Movies like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars, The War of the Worlds and so forth cannot be made as volunteer projects.

One big change that's going on is that more and more people have larger TV screens, making the experience in the living room more like being in a theater from the purely visual standpoint. Or so they think. However, there really is no substitute for the social aspect of the theater experience, especially in terms of making it an evening of a dinner followed by a movie (or a movie followed by a dinner). Believe me, most women won't count viewing a rented or stolen movie as quite the same thing as having a movie ticket bought for them.

While in the case of the music industry, one can talk about cutting out a corrupt middleman, in the case of the film industry, if there are to be big budget movies and movie theaters at all, there have to be paying customers.

The sad thing is that, given the lower cost options of renting or stealing movies, more and more people are watching movies at home instead of in theaters, and the more people don't go to movie theaters, the more the cost of a movie ticket will have to go up.