A few years have passed, the technological Rubicon has long since been crossed, since contemporary cinema has entered the new era of completely original and different production and vision methods from the recent past. Everything has changed: from film to digital media, from shooting tools to narrative and visual languages. It was 2013 when in Venice the director William Friedkin (The violent arm of the law, The exorcist etc) anticipated the future that awaited cinema: the Internet.
We are in full development post-cinema. Although it seems that this is not the case yet and the theaters still manage to keep the public glued to the seats – still for a little while and progressively decreasing – in the meantime – but something changes.
Two recent pieces of news deserve attention: the Los Angeles Times reported rumors, considered reliable, according to which Netflix would be willing to buy the ownership of cinemas. For now only in the United States but not excluding other countries as well. There have been no confirmations or denials but the news is interesting. According to Reed Hastings, current CEO of Netflix, who in recent days announced that he had exceeded 125 million direct users, also declared that in the next 30 years we will see the definitive disappearance of television and it will become extinct like the dinosaurs. The future is all and only in the network. At the heart of this process will be films and serial productions. However, this also leads to thinking in a medium or short-term dimension where the distribution and promotion of this kind of product will hardly be able to ignore the traditional circuits. In other words, it will not be easy to do without the competition for the Oscars as well as the participation in various international festivals such as Cannes, Venice or Berlin. Here then is that cinemas could come in handy, albeit revised and corrected both in the technological dimension and in the logistical and organizational one (see multiplex circuits).
In the post-cinema era, as perhaps in all fields of production, marketing can have the same weight as the product itself. Having a good title in the library and not being able to market it properly is almost like not having it.
The second news concerns Luca Guadagnino. In recent days, still in the USA, the CinemaCon, considered one of the most important events in the international cinema industry. On this occasion, the already award-winning author of “Call me with your name” previewed the trailer of the next work, expected in the autumn, perhaps good for the competition at the Venice Film Festival. This is the remake of "Suspiria” by Dario Argento from 1977, a tribute to the horror thriller genre that gave the Italian director so much luck. The interesting news is that the film is produced by Amazon Studios which since 2013 has been creating and distributing original content mainly intended for on-demand television but which is now also expanding towards traditional film productions.
The challenges in the post-cinema arena promise to be epochal: in addition to the aforementioned, there are giants like Google and Apple who are sharpening their weapons, some on the front of new technologies, some on the content front. The crossroads remains suspended between the big screen and the comfortable armchair at home. We will talk about it for a long time.
