

You could make THE CLASH OF THE TITANS or THE LAST AIRBENDER in 4-D, 5-D, Smell-O-Vision, holograms, or images projected directly into your brain – no one is going to come see them.Īgain, it all comes down to quality. Ultimately, what brings people into the Cineplex is good movies. But I caution the studios, 3-D alone won’t do it. Do we really need to see a close-up of Mick Jagger’s face six stories tall?Īs with Cinerama, there has been an initial flush of success.

Better even than IMAX, their savior that didn’t save them last decade. To counter this, Hollywood has unveiled its latest stunt– 3-D. Ticket prices are high, commercials are shown, and inconsiderate assholes are texting and reading email during showings.
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Studios face competition not only from TV but now from Netflix, streaming video, DVRs, ON DEMAND, Wii, my blog, and even smart phones. (Can you imagine if they tried Smell-O-Vision with a "certain scene" in SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE?)Īnd here we are today. You were left with the delightful aroma of fishy roses (which would probably still sell better than Jennifer Aniston's current perfume line is). Smells weren't timed correctly, some parts of the theater got more of a blast than others, some scents were slow to dissipate.

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So when a movie stunk, it stunk! And they did. She’d walk into a seafood store and you’d smell fish. A character on screen would hold up a bouquet of roses and you’d smell roses. As absurd as this sounds, odors were pumped into theaters. By the 70s, Cinerama was effectively over.Īnother innovation Hollywood unveiled that was destined to revolutionize the movie industry was Smell-O-Vision. Yeah, visually I’m sure it was eye-popping, but no one wanted to see CIRCUS WORLD or THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL. Please make a pit stop! Anything to break up the monotony! Crash! Endless scenes of point-of-view driving in race cars. I recall sitting through this ponderous James Garner movie, GRAND PRIX. Movies started being made in Cinerama, and after a while the novelty wore off. I didn’t even care that there was no story and I was nauseous halfway through the picture. You were riding on a giant rollercoaster, going through the canals of Venice, hanging out at Niagara Falls. I remember running to the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood to see THIS IS CINERAMA. Even Lucy & Ethel couldn’t compete with that.

Talk about a widescreen - three projectors simultaneously showing a movie on a huge, deeply-curved screen. In an attempt to make the theater experience more special, Hollywood unveiled a new way to see movies – Cinerama. And color TV was hitting the market (albeit slowly… almost one color at a time). John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor were getting their asses kicked by George Gobel and Gale Storm. When acquiring a film, a traditional studio usually pays a small fee up front to get the rights, and then shares the profit if the film is a hit.In the late ‘50s movie studios faced stiff competition from television. And he said Netflix’s approach to buying film rights, by paying a flat fee, can be safer for producers. He wants to “ make the movie business bigger,” not smaller, by tapping underserved markets. Sarandos says Netflix is the antidote to that. In fact, there are many movies recently that have bombed in the US but done well overseas. Hollywood, Sarandos says, is increasingly focused on blockbusters that do well internationally.Īnd beyond being formulaic in the extreme, these films aren’t even always the ones American audiences want to see. These movies are the mid-level films, the ones that don’t have superheroes or big explosions. “There are movies that people really want to watch that are no longer being made and no longer being put in movie theaters because studios don’t want to make them anymore,” he said, according to Vanity Fair.
