The Digital Age and Home Viewing

The VCR was still a popular appliance in most households (about three quarters of them in 1991) and rentals and purchase of videotapes were big business – much larger than sales of movie theater tickets.  By 1997, the first DVDs offered sharper resolution pictures, were more durable than videotape, often offered interactive extras, and provided more secure copy-protection.

As a result, one emerging trend of distribution involved bypassing the high distribution costs by releasing/exhibiting some 400 new films per year directly to disc or premium cable (which resulted in an increasing loss of the broadcast audience).

And with the digital revolution, some pioneering filmmakers were experimenting with shooting and projecting digitally, and discovered this allowed to use special effects CGI in more subtle, innovative ways:

• Jurassic Park (1993) was the first film with DTS sound
• Forrest Gump (1994) used digital photo trickery to insert a person into historical footage and to erase the legs of amputee played by the Oscar-nominated Gary Sinise.
• George Lucas‘ Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) included characters that were entirely digitally rendered, such as the much-hated Jar Binks
• *** Lucas’ second Star Wars prequel: Attack of the Clones (2002) was the first major Hollywood motion picture to be filmed entirely with digital video

Groundbreaking Internet Film-Marketing:  The Blair Witch Project

In 1999 directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick made the ultra-low budget, independently produced horror film, The Blair Witch Project, which details the efforts of three student filmmakers to document the legend of the ‘Blair Witch.’ However, part way through their journey they become lost in the Black Hills Forest and soon find themselves prey to this invisible entity.   A frame story explains that this footage was found buried under the foundation of a house.  Considerable buzz at film festivals was cultivated by viewers who believed the story to be true.  In actuality, this faux-documentary—shot in 8 days using shaky hand-held camera style—initiated a new genre of filmmaking known as “found footage” films.

Foretelling new methods of Internet-based marketing, Sanchez and Myrick’s chose to launch the film via an internet marketing campaign which involved asking potential audience members to visit the “Blair Witch” website and petition for the release of the film in their cities.  Surprisingly, it easily became ***the most profitable film (percentagewise) of all time, grossing $140.5 million (domestic) and $249 million (worldwide), but budgeted at only about $60,000. Remarkably, it had no stars, no large marketing budget, no state-of-the-art special effects, and no creatures/monsters.