Update from Mumbai and Bollywood

Mumbai has been too much in the news for a rather unhappy reason lately. Fortunately our colleagues at Adlabs, as well as friends and families are unhurt, but killings were going on right outside our Metro BIG cinema and dozens of foreigners and Indians were killer and injured. The terror attacks have hit the box office, though hopefully people will find their way back to the cinemas to dream themselves away for a few hours.

This and other things mean that I will sadly have to give CineAsia a miss this year, which is a particular shame given that BIG Cinemas is honoured as International Exhibitor of the Year. But there is plenty of updates from Film Journal International on the film and cinema industry in India. Nyay Bhushan reports on how Bollywood billions: Indian distribution and production change with the times, while Kevin Lally report on how D vs. E: E-Cinema keeps foothold in India as 2K digital grows. Both articles are well worth reading.

Thank you, lastly, to all the friends and colleagues who have contacted me to make sure that we are all OK. Your kind thoughts and well wishes were much appreciated. These are unhappy times, but they do not weaken our resolve to stay on and make digital cinema happen in India.

Adlab's BIG Cinemas is Exhibitor of the Year at CineAsia 2008

No sooner had Adlabs' exhibition arm been re-branded BIG Cinemas then the news broke that it will be crowned Exhibitor of the Year at this year's CineAsia held in Macau on 9-11 December. We are thrilled on behalf of our colleagues at BIG Cinema who have worked tirelessly to not just make it India's largest cinema chain, but now also one of the most honoured. From THR.com:

Sunshine said that the 2008 edition at the Wynn Hotel and the Macau Tower, set for Dec. 9-11, will feature an advance 3-D screening of the Disney animated comedy "Bolt." The confab's Exhibitor of the Year award will go to Tusha Dhingra, the head of India's Big Cinemas, formerly known as Adlabs.

This comes not long after the cinema chain was named Retailer of the Year award and Best Retailer in Entertainment before that. But this definitely tops both of those achievements. I would like to think that being a digital cinema pioneer in India had a small part to play in the decision underpinning this award.

The global economy may be down but India just had a weekend box office bonanza with the twin hits Golmal Returns and Fashion both playing to full houses. This coming weekend Quantum of Solace will open here (a week before the US, no less) on the largest print release ever for a Hollywood film in India - 600 prints, beating Sony's previous record for Spider-Man 3 (597 prints), with Casino Royal (427 prints) in third place rounding off SPE's hat trick.

The coming weeks will see releases that were pushed back from their original Diwali release slots, so it should be a very happy Q4 for BIG Cinemas and other Indian exhibitors.

Hollywood d-cinema titles for China dry up

There was great hope for digital cinema in China for many years. The country topped the Asia-Pacific league of digital installations; digital cinema was seen as a way of both beating piracy and showing more Hollywood films than the foreign film quote would otherwise allow and rolling out digital is always easier when you can write it into a Five Year Plan, as I joked. But based on the first day of CineAsia, things are apparently no longer going so well.

At least, that seems to be the message of this article from Screen Daily (China’s digital loop stymied by lack of US product):

The Chinese government started to develop the country’s first digital cinema circuit in 2002 with an initial investment of $25m. Local cinema owners then began to lease equipment - mostly from state-owned China Film Digital - which has been sourced from global digital cinema service suppliers such as Barco, Christie and Panasonic.
...
However, few digital cinemas in China are compliant with the Digital Cinema Initiative’s 2K technical standard announced in July 2005. Therefore the US studios have stopped distributing digital versions of their films in China even though such films bypass the country’s import quotas.
...
Barco and GDC Technology are business partners with Guangdong Dadi Cinemas and have supplied its six cinemas and 14 screens with 2K - 4K resolution equipment.

But as the US studios say there are not enough screens to make it worthwhile releasing any digital versions.

It appears that no major Hollywood film has been released since Dreamwork's Shark Tale in April 2005. That's over a year without a digital titles from Hollywood! And that's not the only bad news:

Separately from d-cinema expansion in China’s major cities, China’s Film Bureau is rolling out cheaper, lower-resolution e-cinema in smaller cities and rural villages.

Good news for small villages, as long as they don't want to watch Eragon or Bond, but not good if you want a global digital market based on one standard.

CineAsia 2007 moving to City of Sin and Vice

I did not make it to CineAsia this year, nor have I ever been to one, but if ever there was a time to go it, it will be next year. It was nothing to do with cinema or digital and everything to do with the location. Of the three major Sunshine conventions, spot the odd one out for locations: Las Vegas, Amsterdam and Beijing. That's right, Las Vegas has gambling and prostitution (though latter only outside Clarke County city limits), Amsterdam has drugs and prostitution, while in Beijing, such things are verboten even in the Forbidden City.

But as of next year CineAsia is moving to Macau, according to this article in the Hollywood Reporter ( CineAsia could move to South China resort ). Macau is well known for gambling, there might be prostitution, though I doubt that they are the sort of 'coffee shops' that you would find in Amsterdam. The official reason is that it will make travel for exhibitors from Taiwan easier, as well as impose less restrictions on the organisers than holding it in Beijing does. This year, apparently, a digital trailer that was supposed to be shown on the opening night was held up. But a contact also told me that mainland Chinese exhibitors aren't interested in going to Beijing, but want to get away from home for this type of convention. To quote from the article,

"For networking, we must go where the exhibitors want to go and I would bet that when they're making their December plans in October, they'd rather go to Macau than Beijing. It's more fun," said Rieder, CineAsia's Distributor of the Year."

Not that any of us at Deluxe go to ShoWest or CinemaExpo for 'fun'. It's hard work and lots of it, I will have you know. And before someone leaves a comment about ShowEast disproving my theory that these conferences are only located in areas of major vices, I have one word for you: golf.

In another article about shooting Chinese films in digital, we are told that:

Digital shoots may be increasingly, popular but digital distribution is still underperforming. The country's rush to a digital cinema future has slowed over the past year or so; there are fewer than 200 digital screens, and compliance with international standards is still a major issue.

Don't expect China's two-tier system of having a digital equivalent of 16mm projectors to go away any time soon.