Roger Ebert predicted the future of cinema in 1987, and he wasn’t wrong: “You’ll not go to a video store”
If every bold prediction for the future of cinema came to pass, then we’d still be living in a world of Smell-O-Vision, and you can guarantee that somebody would have used it in porn by now. Thankfully, some fads die out as quickly as they’re supposed to, but many other prognostications have come true.
On one hand, you can look back and laugh at the folks who were adamant that the talkies would never catch on, just like you can chuckle at how rapidly modern Hollywood abandoned turning every single blockbuster into a post-converted 3D monstrosity. As far as good guesses went, though, Roger Ebert didn’t do too badly at all.
In 1987, when the highest-grossing release of the year in the United States was Three Men and a Baby, the most-watched series on television was The Cosby Show, and Michael Caine missed out on collecting his Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in person because he was too busy filming Jaws: The Revenge, the critic gazed into the future and took a stab at what was coming next.
In retrospect, it was less of a stab and more of William Tell shooting an apple off somebody’s head. Ebert’s accuracy was impressive, and while it wasn’t 100%, not that anyone was expecting it to be, he both managed to nail several short and long-term aspects of cinema that were barely a twinkle in the eye at the time.
“We will have high-definition, widescreen television sets, and a push-button dialling system to order the movie you want at the time you want it,” his crystal ball said. “You’ll not go to a video store, but instead, order a movie on demand and then pay for it. Videocassette tapes as we know them now will be obsolete, both for showing pre-recorded movies and recording movies.”
Bang on, Roger. Almost everyone has a big HD telly in their house these days, and while it’s been ever-so-slightly phased out in the streaming era, the video store is indeed pretty much dead, and it was replaced by the very system he could see coming down the pike: after leaving cinemas and before reaching streaming, every new release can be rented or bought through your TV in seconds.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though, with Ebert “very, very excited by the fact that before long, alternative films will penetrate the entire country.” Back in ’87, he resigned himself to the fact that “75% of the gross from a typical art film in America comes from as few as six different theatres and six different cities,” something he was confident that expansion and technological advancement would change.
That didn’t take long to come to fruition, with the 1990s indie boom opening the doors to mainstream cinemas showing more obscure, off-kilter, and challenging fare, with VOD and streaming again conspiring to make the types of films that would never be shown on the big screen easier to access than ever before. Ebert was a little bit off when he theorised that “by the year 2000 or so, a motion picture will cost as much money as it now costs to publish a book or make a phonograph album,” but he wasn’t wrong, either.
Musicians have more avenues than ever to get their songs heard, authors can publish entire novels online, while filmmakers can shoot features on their phones for a shoestring budget, the common thread being that it can all be achieved on a fraction of what it would have cost four decades ago. As far as filmic fortune-telling goes, Ebert’s foresight was impressive.
