Futuríveis
sexta-feira, maio 16, 2008
Sex and the city and the media...
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It may not take a lot to make the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s city tabloid, grumpy but the four actresses of Sex and the City, the new film of the television series, certainly provoked it this week.
The Post was dubious about the hat worn to the film’s premiere by Sarah Jessica Parker, who plays the lead character Carrie Bradshaw in the drama about the lives of four Manhattan women. Even worse than this faux pas, she wore the hat in London, where the film’s world premiere was held.
After London, which the Post dismissed as “the wrong city”, the quartet is hitting Berlin tonight before returning to New York for yet another glitzy launch event in two weeks. New Yorkers must make do for now with posters of Carrie and her friends plastered around the city.
Even in its absence, however, Sex and the City is part of the Zeitgeist. Both the drama itself and the way it is being marketed say a lot about the future of film and television. In fact, here is my Sex and the City guide to the entertainment industry.
First, the world is bigger than the US. Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha are jetting around Europe for the same reason that the Cannes film festival, which opened on Wednesday, includes the premiere of the planned summer blockbuster Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That is where the money is.
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Second, paid-for is bigger than free. That sounds strange in the era of the internet, but entertainment for which consumers rather than advertisers pay is growing more powerful. Americans used to spend many more hours with media such as radio and broadcast television than with DVDs and video games but they are switching.
Third, the small screen is bigger than the big screen. Box office receipts of $9.6bn in the US last year were easily outstripped by the $23.4bn of DVD rentals and sales. Digital technology allows studios to exploit new forms of distribution, including iTunes and video-on-demand. Some 20 per cent of HBO’s revenues come from reselling its dramas.
...The rise of pay television as an artistic force is matched by a decline in the value of run-of-the-mill films in the secondary market. Three Hollywood studios broke away from a deal with Showtime last month to form their own pay television channel after the latter complained that it was paying too much for films and could make its own dramas.
Fourth, adults are bigger than teenagers. Young people have held sway over Hollywood in recent years because they can be relied upon to go to the cinema. But pay television has tapped an adult audience that has been under-served by film studios and can now watch dramas at home on high-definition televisions.
That is breathing life into dramas made for adult niche audiences rather than big teenage and college-student cohorts. Hollywood studios are responding to this. “Studios are being much more deliberate about choosing demographic targets and developing films for them,” says Geoff Sands, a consultant at McKinsey & Company.
As adult targets go, you do not get much better than SATC. It started out as a quintessentially American television series and has ended up as a film seen first by Londoners and Berliners. Romance, promiscuity, fashion and all, it is the very model of a modern media enterprise.
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