Morgan Freeman challenges the age old format of movie releases with his new web venture. We talked about Freeman doing this back in July and now it looks like the deal is done and scheduled to launch.
Yahoo News reports:
ClickStar, a venture of Intel, Freeman and his producing partner Lori McCreary’s Revelations Entertainment, will launch its new Web site on December 1, the same day Freeman’s low-budget movie, “10 Items or Less,” is expected to land in theaters.
Two weeks later, “10 Items” can be downloaded at cstar.com, and while that is not exactly a simultaneous release, Clickstar Chief Executive James Ackerman said his goal is “day-and-date” downloads. Even the 14-day gap flaunts the Hollywood convention of having DVDs and downloads follow theater releases by months. The price for each movie download is not yet final.
I think this will be a wonderful experiment. If this is successful, it just might make the big studios reconsider how they plan to release movies. At least online – which is something LOTS of organizations are trying to set the standard for right now.
Intel’s own ViiV technology is being built around this sort of media sourcing, linking your computer to your home theatre, streaming content you get from the internet and viewing it on your expensive overcomensating home theatre system.
Movies seem to be released in theatres and though the gap is shortening, an average of 4 months pass before we are able to own the movie on dvd. Now if this venture proves to offer some incentive to take blockbusters to download much sooner, it could SERIOUSLY improve the amount of downloads they might have received.
But will it be at the cost of people going to the movies if they can wait a mere 14 days and have it at home? I mean we wait on average 1.5 years between hearing about a movie, seeing the teasers, watching the commercials and full trailers, before it comes out in theatres. If you could wait another 2 weeks to just download it (legally) and watch it at home, would you even bother to go to the movie?
What if they just eliminate theatres altogether? Could that happen? Just make the movies and release them to disc? It would change the stigma of movies we mock for going “direct to video”.
Is it even possible to threaten the age old tradition of going to the movies? Or is this something we will only see on low budget films as a viable venue to recoup their costs?
