(Newswire.net — March 10, 2022) —
Never have we been so blessed with what to do in our free time. The likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime have heralded a new era for home entertainment. Cinema might still hold an advantage when it comes to budget and screen size, but storytelling plays out better when it’s allowed more than the 2-3 hours audiences can tolerate in a cinema and shows like Game of Thrones (the first five seasons at least) and The Expanse have shown that CGI is no longer the sole province of high-budget studio movies.
While the studios are desperate to get you out of your homes and back into their theatres, they know they will have to do something truly spectacular to succeed in the post-Covid era. They have lost the battle and for many people there is no longer a good reason to drop that amount of cash for two hours of entertainment.
The studios have long caught up on the idea that it is easier to draw a crowd with familiar characters and stories (that’s why we have so many book adaptations, sequels, prequels and spinoffs) rather than original storylines. They even realised that splitting the adaptation of a book into two movies will drive way more profits than squeezing the entire book into one movie (no, they don’t do it for the fans), but it was Denis Villeneuve who was strong enough to push the studios to split a one-off book into two parts: Dune. It was a good move, it was a great move, but Dune would have been served better with a 10 episode show on Netflix – there is just too much that needs to be edited out to accommodate for cinema time windows.
Videogames have developed beyond recognition from the humble beginnings of Pac-Man and Space invaders. While there are still many examples of clever platform games with quirky protagonists, the trend for the big blockbusters is to set you as the main character within a storyline of your choosing and with as much room to deviate from the main objective as you wish – do you want to set fire to the grass? Be my guest!
The distinction between a game and a movie is blurring, and the trend is clear: design engaging stories, hire professional voice actors, create beautiful visuals and provide the greatest possible freedom. Videogames are morphing into action movies in which you are the hero. A trend which will accelerate as soon as all the problems associated with VR are solved (lag, nausea, cost, and weight of the headset…). Once those have been addressed, well, then we will be spending much more time in VR than might be considered healthy.
Interestingly, there has been one form of home entertainment that has been particularly impervious to technology and modernization: books. Yes, we can now read them on our Kindle and we can listen to them on our iPhones, but the medium has proven quite resilient to innovation. And, yet, books are more popular than ever. Led by fiction, sales of print books grew almost 9% in the US in 2021 and sold more than 800 million copies – and this does not take into account the sale of ebooks and audiobooks, which have seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the last few years.
Kinetic novels have created a bridge of sorts between books and videogames, but have had little traction outside of Japan. Little experimentation has instead been made to bridge the gap between books and movies. One such attempt which has a chance of achieving this is the Arrival of the Gods project. A self-described video novel, this is an audiobook with an original music score and ambient animations (not too different from lo-fi music videos). If we can agree that books are going to line our shelves for the foreseeable future, then this might represent a trend we will be seeing a lot of.
Regardless of your preferences, there is little incentive to leave home to go to a cinema: with very few exceptions (Dune part 2, being one of them) we are spoiled for choice within our domestic walls.