Cinema was already regarded as an “invention with no future” by its inventor, Lyon industrialist Auguste Lumière, who together with his brother Louis conducted the first public film screening in the Grand Café in Paris in December 1895. In the nearly 130 years that have passed since then, people have repeatedly claimed either that cinema is in its death throes or indeed has already expired. Cinema, dubbed the “seventh art” by the Italian critic Ricciotto Canudo in the late 1910s, seems to be the Schrödinger’s cat among art forms: alive yet haunted by the shadow of its own demise.
First it was radio, an entertainment medium that cost nothing to use, that threatened to deal a death blow to cinema in the 1920s, and then television and later home video in all its various formats, from VHS to Blu-Ray. It is true that the number of cinemagoers dropped sharply in the mid-twentieth century, subsequently stabilising in the 1970s at roughly a quarter of the level seen in the 1940s. Nonetheless, cinema prevailed time and again as a venue for initial film screenings in every period of crisis. And that’s not all: in the 1980s and 1990s, cinema constituted the first link in an exhibition and distribution chain that was becoming longer and longer and tended to transcend all temporal and spatial boundaries. While cinema screenings still accounted for 90 per cent of average box-office receipts in the late 1970s, 20 years later 75 per cent of revenue was generated by secondary and tertiary exploitation such as TV, cable television and home video, without this having caused the cinema market to contract.
Hollywood is in any case the world’s most profitable cultural industry. Since the 1910s, the US film industry has translated the economies of scale of its domestic market into perpetual global dominance by controlling a worldwide distribution network: because the domestic US market is so huge, with annual sales of 1.7 billion cinema tickets, Hollywood can operate with budgets many times higher than those in other countries. For example, anyone who buys a cinema ticket to watch a Hollywood film in Europe will get to see a movie for the price of their ticket that quite obviously cost far more to produce than any European film. The addition of secondary and tertiary exploitation has further increased this “comparative advantage”, to use the old term coined by British economist David Ricardo: since the 1990s at the latest, Hollywood has been generating on average four times as much revenue with a film as it was doing in the late 1960s.
However, the pandemic appeared at last to have put the final nail in cinema’s coffin. Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon piped films into the safe environments of our homes, and cinema seemed to have become obsolete. All that remained was film itself, available on all digital platforms virtually at any time and anywhere with a reliable internet connection. What this did reveal at least was that films are not reliant per se on cinema theatres: film, because it can be scaled to a wide range of formats and platforms, is an “immutable mobile” as defined by the French sociologist Bruno Latour, that is to say, a media format which – like a map, for instance – retains its internal structure and its utility, even if the medium or scale change.
Employing a mixture of nostalgia, risk aversion and sheer production power, American cinema at least has neatly side-stepped the problem once again. Since the 1990s, Hollywood has increasingly been living off sequels and extensions to fictional universes such as the “Star Wars” saga and Marvel Comics films. Producing sequels, prequels or extensions of established film franchises is less risky than developing entirely new formats and content.
