Culture

In the theater today and on DVD tonight

IFC Entertainment unveils a plan to release 24 films in theaters and on cable at the same time this year.

Jan. 30, 2006 12:00 p.m. PT

4 min read

PARK CITY, Utah--Hollywood will inch further toward making movies simultaneously available in theaters, on DVD and on home television screens at the Sundance Film Festival this week, as IFC Entertainment unveils a plan to release 24 films in theaters and on cable at the same time this year.

Beginning in March, the initiative, which the company is calling First Take, will place films in independent theaters while also making them available over a new video-on-demand service that will be carried by all the major cable companies, said Jonathan Sehring, IFC Entertainment's president. The company, which includes a film production and distribution arm, is expected to make the announcement at a news conference on Monday.

"So much great film has fallen by the wayside," Sehring said. "The studios are collapsing the window between the theatrical release and the DVD. We're taking that one step further."



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The company named six films it had scheduled for simultaneous release, including "CSA: The Confederate States of America," a dark, faux documentary that envisions the United States if the South had won the Civil War; "I Am a Sex Addict," a semiautobiographical comedy about a young man who becomes addicted to prostitutes; and "American Gun," a series of stories about the proliferation of weapons across the country, starring Donald Sutherland and Forest Whitaker.

The simultaneous release in several distribution modes, called "day and date" release in Hollywood, has been the subject of intense debate in the industry, as movie attendance in theaters has dropped for three years in a row while cell phones and iPods have become the improbable new hosts for filmed entertainment.

The first big test of the new strategy will be on Friday with the release of Steven Soderbergh's small, cinema verite-style film "Bubble," a murder mystery with stars who have not acted before, in Parkersburg, W.Va.

Financed by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, two former Internet entrepreneurs, "Bubble" will open in Cuban's chain, Landmark Theaters, as well as on his HDNet high-definition network. Even so, the DVD will not be available until the following Tuesday.

In many ways, the independent film world is best suited for experimenting with these new distribution strategies, because of the large number of films that are not widely seen, and because the low budgets make them a less risky proposition.

IFC's initiative will involve more films and almost certainly more viewers. Because the films will be made available on cable, far more subscribers will have access to the video-on-demand service than now receive the HDNet network. Sehring said IFC's research showed that DVD sales were not affected by the date of release, and decided to hold off there.

The main idea, Sehring said, was to respond to the pent-up demand for art house-style films that are usually shown only in a few theaters in major cities, and even then only for a week or two.

"Foreign films are not being released," he said, "aside from Sony Classics. And low-budget American films--they're nonexistent. It's left to the really small companies, and they can't afford to take on a lot of films and get them played outside of New York and L.A."

The rise of specialty divisions at major studios like Fox Searchlight and Focus Features has reduced the opportunities for art-house films, he said, because they now specialize in medium-budget, serious films for adults, once the purview of their parent studios.

The IFC service will ramp up to making 10 to 15 films available a month, including some from other distributors, at a cost of $6.95 a month for subscribers or $5.95 per film.

Sehring said the films would be released in about 10 theaters initially, including IFC's three screens in New York, and in independent chains like Cuban's Landmark theaters.

How quickly other companies will jump in remains to be seen. Many pointed out that the initiative made sense for IFC's parent, Rainbow Media, which owns the Independent Film Channel, and for Cuban's company, which owns HDNet. It may make less sense for other film companies without those kinds of pipelines.

And some said that those who move toward day-and-date releases are going to have trouble finding theaters.

David Dinerstein, an experienced industry executive who recently ran Paramount Classics, said: "It's absolutely imperative to the film business as we know it to not have windows that are day and date. I think they'll meet with resistance from exhibitors along the way, with the exception of the independent chains."

But the producer Steve Tisch said he considered the shift inevitable, especially since young moviegoers do not distinguish between different distribution modes. "I think the industry will resist and resist some more, and then slowly embrace it," he said.