So Sony caved in to pressure and has pulled the film The Interview from its Xmas release schedule.

Sony did this in response to several of the largest theatre chains deciding to not screen it: including AMC and Regal. Now maybe Sony already was planning to cave in to the threat on their own, and the theatre owners' decision is a convenient excuse. But if it really was the case that Sony was ready to stand tough and the theatre owners were the ones exerting the pressure, then it occurs to me that this never would've happened back in the days of the Studio System.

Essentially, its not in Sony's interests to pull back from a controversial yet profitable choice so that Fox and Warner profits aren't affected. But it is in the interests of the multiplex chains who are counting on those Warner and Fox Xmas releases to not allow a courageous stand by Sony to impact their bottom line.

* cue harp music and fade to 1940s era Hollywood *

Back in the day, five of the Big Eight ( with Univeral, Columbia and United Artists as the exceptions ) were "vertically integrated." This means that in all large cities and even most middlin' sized burgs studio owned theatres screened the content of their respective studios. A Fox film was shot at Fox's studio by Fox's contracted artists, it was then distributed by Fox to a Fox theatre. And a Fox theatre wasn't in the business of screening MGM films, or Paramount &tc.

There were independent theatres, and they showed films by the "poverty row" studios like Republic, or they could take films by the majors; but those were sold in sets through "block booking" where the independents couldn't pick and choose.

SCOTUS ended all of this in 1948 in an antitrust case dubbed US v Paramount Pictures. This landmark decision made vertical integration in motion pictures illegal. And it forced the studios to sell off their distribution outfits and their theatres.

Now the irony here is that all the big movie studios began as theatres; specifically vaudeville theatres.

When the flickers were first invented, the public shifted their interests from jugglers, trained dog acts and the like and embraced the new form. For the vaudeville theatre chain owners it was a case of adapt or die. And they did adapt.

But soon the public's need for novelty outpaced the inventor/filmakers' capacity. So instead of bewailing the lack of new content from the Edison studio and its ilk, the theater chain owners suddenly found themselves in the business of creating content for their own theatres.

In many ways vertical integration served the public better. It meant that the chains had a stake in building screens and in employing theater mgrs, ushers &tc, not collectively, but individually. This meant more projectionist jobs, and even with eight dominant studios, more films per year and more choices.

And while generally they aimed to be crowd pleasers, it also meant that if there was some artistic project that only one mogul wanted to champion, by gum it would get made and screened if he deemed that it should be. Generally they thought of the bottom line above all else, but a "vanity" project wasn't subject to pressure at the local level because a Paramount theatre was ultimately a Paramount employee.

If SCOTUS' decision was supposed to promote more diversity, in the long run, it didn't.

Back in the golden era, it was the small towns and rural communities that had only one theatre or none. Only they who were effectively at the mercy of the tastes of the one guy who made those choices about what to play.

These days, as the pressure on Sony shows, you have to live in a very sizeable metropolis indeed to have your choice from multiple theatre chain owners. If you are in a Los Angeles or a Chicago, the cowardice of, say Regal, creates an opportunity for Edwards to serve a public who wants to see a film.

But most all other cities have just one chain in control of all the screens. This is the understandable result of the breakup. There is no longer a financial stake for those with the most profits--the studios--in the screening and distribution end. With all the screens showing a the product of multiple studios and more diverse hands it becomes less about trusting that an MGM theatre willing be screening a certain standard of product and more about reading the reviews and checking the listings in the papers. Whoever owns more screens and can take out a larger ad with more listings has the advantage. And whoever starts larger will get larger and can use their profits in a town they dominate to take out ads in others.

Consolidation is inevitable once the competing content providers are no longer competing screens. Print gave way to the movie phone line. But only recently do we have services like Fandango that allow you to hear whats playing on screens by town, not by the company footing the bill for the phone service. And by now its too late. The screen owners can still largely dictate whether a film plays near you or not.

Any attempt to address this through regulation will likely be just as disastrous as the US v Paramount decision which took individual competing "monopolies" who channeled money into making sure you had access to their content, and instead created chain theatre monopolies for whom no one film will ever be considered in its own right without thinking how it might impact the multiplex's interest in screening something else you were planning to avoid anyway.

Between Sony's filmmakers and Sony's audience lie a bunch of distributors who would ultimately push Sony off a cliff if they could be guaranteed that the results from the other studios would more than make up for it. How that fosters diversity is anyone's guess.

MEANWHILE.....

The millennials have voted that they believe that vertical integration is the future of content distribution and creative innovation. Of course they haven't done so with film screens, SCOTUS made that illegal. So they've done this with TV.

In the 80s the Emmys went to broadcast TV.

In the 90s the Emmys went to shows created for premium cable.

But now in the teens, the Emmys are increasingly going to shows created by the very streaming platforms millennials access all content from. Its Netflix and Amazon-Prime series that are getting all the attention.

And thats really about as direct as it gets. Millennials are interested in the content alone, not in the service per se, and certainly not in a platform for selling cornflakes. They don't care about any other financial consideration from a platform for accessing content than whether they want that content. Anyone catering to the worries of the advertizers or to the FCC's political appointees will soon find themselves irrelevant.

However, there is nothing that compares with seeing cinema on the big screen. It would be nice if someone could figure out a method to do what the millennials understand is best, to allow the content creator and the consumer to enter into a more direct relationship so that other considerations can't loom larger than what the audience and the artist agree to share.

Dante