Hollywood is known for innovation. Dinosaurs, earthquakes, tornadoes, black holes – the movie industry has found ways to bring all sorts of wild and wonderful things to life. But what’s next? How can Hollywood get fans involved at a time when other modes of entertainment, like gaming and streaming TV, are eating up their time?
Virtual Reality
In the Star Trek canon, the various flagships have a room called the Holodeck. It’s an empty space that can create virtual people and places using holograms so that the crew can interact with them as they might in real life. It’s the ultimate in immersive entertainment.
While Holodecks may not be possible at all in real life, virtual reality (VR) headsets like the Oculus Rift nevertheless brought fans a tiny step closer to the Star Trek ideal by allowing the wearer to enter some of the most immersive environments to date. The technology is firmly entrenched in gaming and general exploration (Google Street View, for example) in 2016 but the movie industry is warming to VR.
For instance, a trailer for The Martian, a movie about Matt Damon’s annual rescue from peril, included a short VR segment that let the audience view the Red Planet through the protagonists’ eyes. Similar experiences exist for The Hunger Games and Lion King but some of the more iconic VR movies to date went under the radar.
White Room 02B3 is a smartphone movie that tells the story of six people trapped in a room with a gun. It might not sound too special (unless you enjoy ham acting) but the fact that the viewer’s understanding of events changes depending on who they look at is a unique angle in a film. There’s also 11:57, an “on-rails” horror movie, and Colosse, an animated adventure.
Cryptocurrency
Given the fact that Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin is accepted at outlets as varied as travel and gaming websites, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Hollywood caught up with the rest of the world and began selling cinema tickets in the currency. Again, much like VR, cryptocurrency is a new arrival in the movie industry.
It’s not a new phenomenon though – much of Bitcoin’s growth occurred underground, away from the mainstream. With that in mind, the token has a significant presence in the iGaming sector, an industry that allows visitors to play games like poker, slot machines and roulette. Vegas Casino is one of the brands which has even gone exclusively Bitcoin-operated with deposit and pay-out options only available in the virtual currency.
It’s easy to view Bitcoin as a bit of a passing trend but the currency offers a number of benefits over fiat money (dollars, pounds, etc.) for customers and businesses alike. Vegas Casino lets players harvest their own cryptocurrency with an on-site ‘faucet’ and take advantage of the fact that payments in Bitcoin are immediate, irreversible, and untraceable.
Returning to the movie industry, the first film to accept Bitcoin for cinema tickets was Pharrell Williams’ 2015 comedy, Dope. The film, which uses Bitcoin as a plot point, was screened at one sixth of the cinemas in the United States, according to Coin Telegraph. The development owes a great deal to the partnership between a movie tickets website and payment processor, GoCoin.
Finally, one of the biggest developments in movie-making over the past few years is more than a little ironic. The most recent Star Wars film, Episode VII, was shot the old-fashioned way, in 35mm film. It’s a much more robust medium than today’s hyper-sensitive cameras, making it great for directors who like to take their filming on the road. Whether other classic filmmaking techniques, like putting an intern in a gorilla suit, will ever make a comeback is debatable.
