Internet

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Internet

MOVIE PROMOTION ON THE INTERNET
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT PARADIGM AND ONLINE FAN DISCOURSE
MOVIE DISTRIBUTION AND THE INTERNET
FURTHER READING

Although the origins of the Internet can be traced to the 1960s with the founding of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) by the US Department of Defense, the medium's significance for the film industry began with the proliferation of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. Before the development of the Web, Internet use was limited to text-based communication by a relatively small number of people over slow modem connections. Since the late 1990s, however, high-speed access through Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) and cable modems into US homes has opened up possibilities for promoting and distributing digitized films and videos over the Internet to a mass audience.

MOVIE PROMOTION ON THE INTERNET

In the summer of 1995, media and advertising executives announced that the Internet had become the "new frontier" in film promotion. Marketing Batman Forever (1995), Warner Bros. was the first to promote a major feature film using a Website as the campaign's center-piece. The Web address (or URL) was included on posters, print and television advertisements, and radio spots, and the Batman Forever logo appeared with the URL without elaboration at bus and train stations. The film's Website offered a hypertextual narrative that linked to plot twists and hidden pages for users to discover by correctly answering a series of concealed questions posed by the Riddler, one of the film's main characters. The Batman Forever Website also cross-promoted ancillary products from its sister companies, including the soundtrack recording and music videos.

In June 1995 Universal Pictures partnered with leading Internet service providers American Online and CompuServe to present the first live interactive multisystem simulcast to promote a film on the Web with Apollo 13 star Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard before the premiere. The Website later included special Internet video greetings from some of the film's stars and digital still pictures from the film's Los Angeles premiere. Another notable early example of Internet promotion was the Website for Mars Attacks! (1996), by Warner Bros., which included an original fifteen-minute Internet "radio play" about a truck driver who evades Martians while attempting to deliver the only print of Mars Attacks! in time for the premiere. In late 1996, the Star Trek: First Contact Website received over 30 million hits during its first week of release, at that point the largest traffic ever for a film Website, and by the end of 1996, movie trailers, digitized stills, actor and filmmaker profiles, and computer screensavers were available online for almost every major film released. Web addresses were also commonly included in theatrical trailers, TV commercials, print advertisements, and posters. In 1997 studios were spending approximately $10,000 to produce an independent film's Website and at least $250,000 for blockbuster studio films, which accounted for an extremely small portion of the overall promotional budget.

In 1999 studios began to coordinate Website tie-ins with pay-per-view orders, allowing viewers to "play along" at home through synchronized Web content. Viewers who purchased the December 1999 pay-perview release of New Line Cinema's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me were offered an interactive television experience synchronized over the Web. For the DVD release of The Matrix (1999), Warner Bros. scheduled a synchronized screening and Internet chat session with the film's directors. In 1999 Apple Computer launched its very popular movie trailer Web page to promote its QuickTime video software, receiving over 30 million downloads for the Web-based trailers for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) alone.

Throughout 1999, the major studios also established online retail stores in partnership with their studios' other Web operations. Increasingly since the 1980s, the film studios have become part of larger transnational media conglomerates that often have holdings in other industry sectors. The Web is thus inordinately well suited to this structure of convergence and integration, providing a retail and cross-promotional portal to sister and parent company products, services, and subsidiary media outlets.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT PARADIGM AND ONLINE FAN DISCOURSE

The Blair Witch Project (1999) was one of the most profitable films in history when measured by its return on the initial investment. Made for approximately $50,000 and grossing over $100 million in US theatrical box-office alone, this financial victory of a low-budget independent film over the major studio blockbusters instigated a paradigm panic among Hollywood executives due in large part to the important role of the Internet in the film's commercial success. When the mainstream film industry had already begun to create content specific to the Web, Internet promotion was still considered to be supplementary to established media outlets, and the theatrical film was still the main component of the brand or franchise. For The Blair Witch Project, however, the Web became the central medium or the primary text for the film's narrative and its reception, as well as its marketing or "franchising" beginning more than a year before the film's major theatrical distribution. In this sense, the Web functioned in the 1990s for The Blair Witch Project in the same way that newspapers and magazines did in relation to the earliest commercial cinema in the 1890s by playing a primary role in the film's narrative and its meaning for the audience.

Directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez originally launched The Blair Witch Project Website in June 1998 on their production company's Website, Haxan.com. When the independent distributor, Artisan Entertainment, bought The Blair Witch Project for $1.1 million from directors Myrick and Sánchez at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999, the company envisioned exploiting the medium of the Web to compensate for its relative lack of funds for promotion. On April Fool's Day, Artisan relaunched The Blair Witch Project Website with additional material, including footage presented as outtakes from "discovered" film reels, police reports, the "back story" on missing film students, and a history or mythology of the Blair Witch legend. The next day Artisan sent 2,000 The Blair Witch Project screensavers to journalists and premiered its trailers on the "Ain't It Cool News" Website instead of on television or in theaters.

Although the low-budget or "no budget" quality of The Blair Witch Project became an integral part of the film's marketing strategy, shortly after acquiring the distribution rights to The Blair Witch Project Artisan spent $1.5 million on Web promotion as part of its $20 million campaign (a significantly greater percentage of the promotional budget than mainstream studio films). Resonating with the film's "mockumentary" style, at the heart of the Web campaign was the blurring of the boundaries between actual and fictional documents through additional "evidence" on the Web and the omission of any explicit admission or demarcation of the promotional material as fiction or as promotional advertising. In addition to the official Blair Witch Project Website, unofficial Websites and fan pages elaborated the film's mythology and offered original narratives. Hundreds of Blair Witch Project video parodies were distributed through the Web, and several of the film's detractors launched an anti–Blair Witch Project Web ring that included a Web page created by a group of citizens from Burkittsville, Maryland, "to explain to the world that Burkittsville was being harmed by a fictional movie set in [their] town." Debates about the film's authenticity filled Web boards, Usenet newsgroups, and online chat rooms.

In an attempt to differentiate its promotion, the May 2001 Internet campaign for the film Artificial Intelligence: A.I. adopted The Blair Witch Project's strategy of passing off fictional Web material as the real thing, when the marketers integrated several Websites with hundreds of pages and days' worth of material that mimicked the aesthetic of real sites, such as the Website for the fictional Bangalore World University. These Websites contributed to a larger pretend Evan Chan murder mystery that complemented the film and took place in the future after the film's narrative. These fictional Websites were updated daily and, like the Web campaign for The Blair Witch Project, none revealed that they were part of a marketing campaign for A.I. Similarly, in August 2001 director Kevin Smith constructed a fake Website bashing his own film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, replete with fictional testimonials and video from crew members. Many fans mistook it for the real thing and posted emails to the site's creator. For the most part, these attempts to recreate the same kind of marketing success and financial return of The Blair Witch Project have been unsuccessful, and it remains an important and exceptional case in film history. Largely abandoning attempts to manufacture authentic word-of-mouth (or word-of-text) interest for their films, it is now common for the major studios to hire agencies and pay employees and fans (or "street teams") to promote films and to spread positive word of mouth online in chat rooms, movie review sites, and discussion boards.

The failure or success of a Web campaign depends in large part upon the target audience and the film's genre. Indeed, many of the examples included here are from genres that appeal to boys and young men, a demographic that comprises a large portion of overall Internet users. To offer another example from the fantasy genre, in 2001 the Wall Street Journal maintained that the Website for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings was the most elaborate and visited to date, offering audio and video clips in ten languages, an interactive map of Middle Earth, chat rooms, screensavers, interviews with members of the cast and crew, and links to some of the thousands of existing fan sites. In 2004, the narrative for the Matrix trilogy was extended beyond the final filmic installment, Matrix Revolutions, inthe form of The Matrix Online, a video game that also uses the Internet to allow thousands of Matrix fans to role-play within and to develop the film's fictional world.

While the Matrix is a deliberate example of franchising a brand across different media, films also live on beyond their official narratives through creative fan communities, such as the thousands of pages of online fiction that continue the storyline of Titanic (see http://www.titanicstories.com) and hundreds of other films (see http://fanfiction.net), or the active online culture surrounding the Star Wars and Star Trek films that includes online writings, artwork, games, and fan films or videos. When Lucasfilm threatened legal action against a teenage college student for creating one of the earliest and most visited Star Wars fan Websites, other fans deluged Lucasfilm with angry emails, prompting Lucasfilm to apologize to its fans for the "miscommunication" in a letter posted on the Web. Lucasfilm has since created an official partnership with the Website AtomFilms.com to distribute the many Star Wars videos and films produced by fans.

MOVIE DISTRIBUTION AND THE INTERNET

The Internet quickly became a significant retail outlet for the distribution or sale of DVD releases, and by 2001 all of the major film companies had partnered with the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb (www.imdb.com), and leading online retailer Amazon.com to promote new theatrical films, personalize movie showtimes, and sell DVDs. In October 1990, IMDb started as the Usenet newsgroup bulletin board rec.arts.movies to which volunteers would post information about films and discuss movies with other fans. With the advent of the Web, the bulletin board was transformed into one of the most visited sites on the Internet, averaging over 30 million visitors each month and containing over 6 million individual film credits, including information on over 400,000 films, 1 million actors and actresses, and 100,000 directors. The IMDb has also built a strong sense of community among its almost 9 million registered users, who can post to the public discussion forum available for each film and rate a film between 1 and 10. All of this information lends itself to the customized links available for celebrity news and gossip, images of stars, box-office and sales statistics, and Amazon.com for DVD purchases.

In addition to providing easy access to detailed information about films and convenient ways for consumers to purchase DVDs, the Internet also provides a distribution method for alternative or independent fictional films and documentaries. The technical and economic advantages of digitization and online distribution have benefited academics and researchers through the availability of digitized film archives like the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection and the Internet Archive's Movie Archive, which includes the Prelinger Archives. The Internet also serves as a significant medium of distribution for multimedia art, Flash movies, film parodies, home movies or videos, and animated political cartoons. In addition, the distribution and sale of pornographic films and videos online totaled over $1 billion in 2005 and comprised a large portion of total Internet file-sharing volume.

Due to technical limitations of bandwidth and connection speeds as well as legal obstacles surrounding the Internet rights to distribute Hollywood films, the independent "short" has become one of the most common categories of film distributed online, including a large selection of animated shorts. One of the most popular sites for viewing online films is AtomFilms.com, which launched "AtomFilms Studio" in January 2006 to fund independent producers looking to create short films specifically for Internet broadband distribution. In 2005, in addition to streaming content, AtomFilms.com's major competitor, IFILM.com, expanded its distribution methods to deliver video-on-demand (VOD) to cellular smart-phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

In 2001 BMW premiered its eight-part online promotional series of big-budget, short action films titled The Hire, made by such established international film directors as David Fincher, John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie, Kar Wai Wong, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and John Woo, and such stars as Clive Owen, Stellan Skarsgård, Madonna, Forest Whitaker, and Gary Oldman. On its Website, BMW boasted that the films had been viewed over 100 million times before they were removed from the site in 2005, despite the fact that the films were released on DVD in 2003.

Although technical and infrastructural obstacles related to bandwidth and video quality and size may be overcome, Internet copyright issues, Internet distribution rights, and Internet release time "windows"—which traditionally go from theaters, video/DVD, pay-per-view, premium cable, network television, and basic cable—have also complicated online distribution. For instance, the major rights holders (that is, Hollywood studios and entertainment conglomerates) have prevented companies like Netflix from shifting their distribution and rental methods to on-demand streaming and downloading over the Web, although the online DVD-by-mail rental service is still one of the more profitable Web ventures, ending 2005 with about 4.2 million subscribers and sales approaching $1 billion.

Responding to increased consumer demand, and in response to the fact that only 15 percent of worldwide Hollywood film revenues come from box-office profits, and that two-thirds of the income for the six major studios now comes from the home theater divisions, the majors have begun to pursue their own online distribution options by offering feature-length films already available on DVD for legal downloading, including MovieLink (http://www.movielink.com), a joint venture of MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Bros.; and CinemaNow (http://www.cinemanow.com), financed in part by Lions Gate and Cisco Systems. In December 2005, Apple Computer also began to distribute animated short films from Pixar (co-owned by Apple CEO Steve Jobs), Disney-ABC television programs, and music videos through its popular iTunes music download service. While no feature-length films are included in Apple's library, the January 2006 purchase of Pixar by Disney may facilitate the distribution of Disney's feature films through Apple's service.

By the end of the summer of 2005, industry analysts and mainstream news outlets were announcing the "death of the movie theater" as industry figures and independent film companies began to question and challenge traditional film release windows. Director and producer Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies, and videotape [1989], Traffic [2000], Erin Brockovich [2000], Oceans Eleven [2001]) entered into an agreement with 2929 Entertainment, HDNet Films, and Landmark Theatres to produce and direct six films to be released simultaneously to theaters, DVD home video, and on HDNet high-definition cable and satellite channels. For the 26, January 2006, "stacked release" of the first film from that venture, Bubble, 2929 Entertainment agreed to share 1 percent of the home video DVD profits with theater owners who exhibited the film. Another new distribution model of simultaneous releases was announced in July 2005 by ClickStarInc.com, a Web venture between Intel Corp. and Revelations Entertainment, co-founded by actor Morgan Freeman. ClickStar will offer legal downloading of original feature films before they are released on DVD and while they are still in first-run theaters. Freeman's considerable star power, which he is lending to several of the ClickStar films, may give a film enough exposure through its Web release to be distributed through other media, like cable television.

It remains to be seen whether or not the major studios will welcome these new methods of exhibition and release windows for distribution. History suggests that the mainstream entertainment corporations will resist this model since it would change the established profit-making system. Even if video-on-demand over the Web becomes widely adopted, like the rapid adoption of television by consumers in the 1950s and 1960s, predictions about the impending death of the movie theater may be exaggerated or misguided. The film and entertainment industries have a long history of appropriating newly established models of production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as purchasing independent companies that pose a significant threat, as the acquisition of many formerly independent studios by the Hollywood majors attests. In addition, the same companies that own the major film production, distribution, and exhibition outlets are horizontally and vertically integrated companies that already have oligopolies in many of the other media sectors that will distribute these films in the future, including television, cable, and the Internet.