The 29th annual Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) has enjoyed brisk early sales because its audience loves festivals as much as it loves films.
That’s VIFF director Alan Franey’s read on what drives people to see movies today.
“Festivals are doing well, whereas specialty film exhibition outside festivals is suffering terribly,” said Franey, who also oversees operations at the VanCity Theatre year-round. “More good films than ever before are being made today that will die on the vine without ever being seen by an audience. It’s not just there’s more supply. Demand has shrunk.”
Demand for festivals has spawned about two-dozen film festivals annually in Vancouver.
Franey’s, which generates about $1 million in box office receipts, is Vancouver’s largest film festival and the second largest in Canada after the Toronto International Film Festival. This year’s VIFF will feature 359 films, most of which are independently produced.
Other local growing and popular film festivals include:
- the Vancouver Asian Film Festival (in November);
- the Vancouver Queer Film Festival (in August); and
- the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival (in September).
Home theatres and large TVs are cheaper than ever before, but that hasn’t kept people from going to movies.
According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Canadian and U.S. movie theatres draw nearly three times more people (1.414 billion) than do the two countries’ theme parks and major sports leagues combined.
Independent films, however, attract only about 2.1% of box office receipts.
Demand for 3-D films is the latest craze.
According to the MPAA, receipts for them in Canada and the U.S. grew 375.3% between 2008 and 2009 to US$1.14 billion. Revenue for traditional 2-D films, conversely, grew 0.8% to US$9.47 billion.
Local independent theatre owner Leonard Schein was alert to this trend when he decided in the summer of 2009 to spend $130,000 on 3-D digital cinema projection technology that enabled him to show 3-D blockbusters Avatar and Alice in Wonderland at his Park Theatre on Cambie Street.
“We did it because it’s difficult for single-screen theatres to compete with multiplexes,” he told Business in Vancouver.
MPAA data shows that only 4% of North American movie theatres are single-screen facilities.
Schein had been feeling the pinch of operating in a dying niche within the cinema sector, but his 3-D experiment has been rewarded with profits – something he has not seen in years at the Park Theatre, because he lost countless customers when Canada Line construction deterred passersby.
Schein signed a new three-year lease for his Ridge Theatre on Arbutus Street even though it continues to bleed cash.
“It’s still difficult at the Ridge, but we did well during the Vancouver French Film Festival this summer,” Schein said. “That festival has been going three summers in a row and all have done very well.”
Schein said he also does well in June when the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival attracts moviegoers.
Unlike Schein, however, Franey has resisted investing in 3-D technology at VanCity Theatre because he believes it’s a fad.
“This [sudden popularity of 3-D movies] may fizzle just as quickly. I think it will,” Franey said. “3-D photography has been around since before cinema. It’s always been a bit of a gimmick. Our minds are perfectly capable of looking at a two-dimensional object and seeing the three-dimensionality of it.”
Regardless, the fastest growing sector within digital screens is 3-D. The number of digital 3-D screens worldwide more than tripled in 2009, reaching 8,989, or about 6% of the total.
Digital 3-D screens represent about 55% of the globe’s digital screens.
The shift from showing content from film or video sources to digital technology in movie theatres has excited local entrepreneurs.
Surrey-based Lightyear Digital Theatre (Canada) Ltd. president Robert Dominick told BIV in August that he plans to launch a digital broadcast platform within the year that will enable movie theatres to stream digital content.
“If you go to your Cineplex Odeon theatre right now, you can see a movie and that’s it,” Dominick said. “If you go to a digital theatre, we can stream into that theatre content that you couldn’t see in normal theatres.”
The change would enable theatre owners to reap more revenue by renting their theatres to corporate groups and others who want to view digital content.
He would not reveal his company’s revenue, but said it subcontracts work to retrofit theatres.
It donated $500,000 worth of work last year to upgrade a theatre at Simon Fraser University’s Surrey campus to make it a high-definition, digital venue that can show 3-D productions.