The Bursting Bubble and the Shrinking Window
Posted on | January 28, 2006 at 12:34 pm | 3 Comments
Last night I saw a just-released first-run movie. However, I did not see it a local theater, even though it was playing at one. I saw it from the comfort of my home, in High Definition video. I am speaking of the film Bubble, which is causing controversy because of its unique release strategy – theater, cable TV, and DVD all on the same day (actually, the DVD isn’t coming out until Tuesday, the usual day that DVDs get released). I recorded it on my DVR off the HDNet Movies channel and watched it couple of hours later with my friend Bryce, after a couple of rounds of multiplayer PSP Burnout Legends. The movie is directed by Steven Soderbergh, director of such movies as Erin Brokovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, and innumerable smaller movies, and one of the few people who has the clout to do an experiment like this. Of course it helps that he is backed in this case by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, who own both HDNet and the Landmark Theater chain where the movie is being shown.
Even though this is being touted as the first simultaneous release, that’s not exactly true. See my entry here about a previous occurrence of this, which also involved HDNet and Mark Cuban. The difference in that case is that the DVD was not also released around the same time.
The movie itself is a curiosity beyond it’s unique day-and-date release plan. It’s a small, low-budget movie starring small people – all first-time actors who presumedly were found inhabiting the small eastern town where the movie was filmed. They may or may not be playing people like themselves. Parts of the movie where even filmed in their real homes. The acting is actually pretty good, though a bit underplayed, as you’d expect. The movie was shot on HD video and looks really good on HDNet viewed on an HD set. You can see every little detail of the small, depressing town that the characters inhabit. It’s the kind of town where the people work two or more jobs just to get by, and just finding transportation to those jobs can be a major ordeal.
But the movie is really about the consequences of what can sometimes happen when a comfortable routine is disrupted and turned upside down. I’m not going to go into the plot or characters, because you can read about that in more detail elsewhere if you’re really interested, and enjoyment of the movie hinges partly on not knowing what is going to happen (though nothing was a big surprise, in my opinion). At one point Bryce remarked on how he was really waiting for something, anything, to happen, and looked like he was going to throw his hard cider at the TV.
Bubble has been getting some good reviews – it got a B in my local paper, and Roger Ebert gave it four stars. But I’m really glad I saw it for free, at home. So, in a way, the experiment was a success – this release strategy (especially when you consider the curiosity factor) probably got more people seeing this movie than would’ve happened if it was only in the theaters. I kind of feel sorry for the people who paid to see it, as it is pretty boring. (Luckily, it is also short – 73 minutes.) If this kind of thing is going to have any real success though, the movie has to be more high profile. I think it will be a long time before blockbusters (or even mid-budget movies) are released this way, but I do see a chance that it will happen someday. People are getting pretty fed up with the theater experience and Hollywood has to keep pumping out those movies and making money on them somehow. But movies like Bubble don’t make a great case for shrinking that DVD release window into non-existence. This almost seems like the kind of movie that in the old days would’ve went straight to video anyway. Maybe this is a case of the tail wagging the dog, and the real strategy is to get people into the theaters by creating this buzz around the release plan, instead of the purported excuse of giving people different choices. But we’ll never know until this is applied to more interesting movies. Supposedly Soderbergh is planning to release some more this way, so we’ll see what happens next time.
Latre.
Comments
3 Responses to “The Bursting Bubble and the Shrinking Window”
February 1st, 2006 @ 9:31 pm
hey can i borrow it? I was real curious about it after i kept reading about it everywhere….
February 1st, 2006 @ 9:56 pm
Borrow what? I don’t have the DVD. I recorded it from HDNet Movies on my DVR. Since it was in HighDef, I can’t really transfer it to tape into something viewable.
February 2nd, 2006 @ 8:40 am
oh crud……dang this modern technology……
guess i should really get rid of my betamax tapes ..huh?