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Digital distribution, projection and exhibition is obviously not only to the advantage of minority and Third World film concerns. For the mainstream film industry, the electronic downloading of films in digital format, from central servers to servers in cinema projection booths, is a cheap method of distributing copies of latest releases to the large number of cinema screens demanded by modern saturation-release strategies. There is a substantial saving on print costs in such cases: at a minimum cost per print of $1200-2000, the cost of conventional celluloid print production is between $5-8 million per film. With several thousand releases a year, the potential savings offered by digital distribution and projection are over $1 billion. Distribution currently takes a variety of formats: a series of DVDs (typically 8-10 per feature), deliverable hard drives or via satellite. As an obvious security measure, the data contained on any of these delivery platforms will be encrypted to prevent piracy and cloning. At the moment, individual cinemas organize their own screenings through one of these methods, but eventually it is planned that cinema chains will be digitally networked, allowing a central mainframe server to simultaneously play out a feature film to a number of cinema screens.
The ease and cheapness, together with the ability to hold on to a film rather than having to send a print on to the next cinema, allows a wider range of films to be screened and viewed by the public; minority and small-budget films that would not otherwise get such a release. Certainly, this has been the aim behind the UK Film Council's 250-screen digital projection initiative, designed to enable specialized films to get wider distribution in UK cinemas. It is also easier to ‘scale up' with extra digital copies if a small film achieves surprising box office success. Worldwide release for major films such as The Da Vinci Code (Howard 2006) and Mission Impossible III (Abrams 2004) is replacing staggered global release strategies. The latter allowed for the too easily pirated copying of initial release prints such that later releases were forced to directly compete with, or even be pre-empted by, pirate copies. In contrast, digital distribution enables the low-cost simultaneous global release rather than the same block of prints being slowly circulated in staggered markets. As with the previous phase of audiovisual technology (early sound systems, videotape formats, etc.), certain incompatibilities between compression and server systems mean that films currently have to be distributed in a range of formats. However, in March 2002, ‘Digital Cinema Initiatives' was formed by the major studios - Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warners - to develop an open architecture technical specification for digital cinema which could be taken up by all industry parties. Version 1.1 was released in April 2007. Another initiative, ‘Digital Cinema Implementation Partners' (DCIP), formed by the AMC, Cinemark and Regal cinema chains, is planning to use digital projectors and servers in all its cinemas from 2008. The cost of converting cinemas from celluloid to digital projection is high; over $150,000 per screen.
As in the days of conversion to synch sound at the end of the 1920s, the exhibition sector has been resistant to pressures for it to fund this conversion. But as digital processes become ever more ubiquitous in all phases of the film industry, and as the convenience and flexibility of digital distribution have become evident, exhibitors are acquiescing to the inevitable. Some early predictions estimated that conversion to digital exhibition will be complete by 2012, although the slowing of take-up rates in recent years has cast a question mark over that date. At the end of the 1990s, just as digital cinema was taking hold on the modern film-making and exhibition landscape, Thomas Elsaesser prophetically announced that cinema ‘will remain the same and it will be utterly different'. One way of interpreting this statement is that digital processes and technologies, while they have fundamentally transformed the material base of cinema - from individual photographic frames on strips of celluloid to pixels and bytes - and modified the various stages of the film-making process, from first idea to finished film, have not radically altered either that production process itself or the viewing of the finished product. Films are still scripted, logistically planned, captured and stored as images during a production shoot, and assembled as combinations of originally shot and artificially created images, composited and edited together to form, usually, 100 to 120-minute feature films.
These are then watched by people assembled together in darkened auditoria to form attentive audiences who sit motionless through the run-time of the feature until its end credits roll. Many, if not most, of those watching a digitally projected feature are no doubt oblivious to the ‘revolution' taking place before their eyes. Similarly, the kind of image that may be seen on screen might be noticeably different to those seen in pre-digital times - with a brighter palette, a harder, artificial edge and yet less substantial weight to them - but artificial imagery has been the stuff of cinema since its inception, from Melies's artificially constructed scenes to Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion skeletons. Difference and continuity are the pall-bearers to the supposed death of cinema; an entertainment form that, partly because of the exciting new (and digitally replicated) techniques on offer to its practitioners and the economies of scale which allow digital copies of films to reach their audiences far more cheaply, will ensure the continued existence of that mass public pleasure for the foreseeable future.