10 Things That Signal The Death Of Movies‏

2. The Demise Of Indie Cinema

One of the biggest victims of cinema's shifting trends, priorities and finances has been independent films. Whenever an established director is asked for advice on breaking into the industry, they inevitably trot out the rote answer that it's "never been easier to make your first film", what with the proliferation of cheap digital cameras and editing software. Which is a little misleading because, yes, you can make a film with a lot less than you could before, but that doesn't mean anybody will see it. The early nineties were a boom for indie cinema, with big distributors taking chances on incredibly low budget and non-traditional films like Richard Linklater's Slacker and Kevin Smith's Clerks. Often indie films were a proving ground for directors who would later graduate to big-ticket films, as happened to Linklater and Smith, but just as much there seemed to be a real appetite for movies that were different from the norm. What passed for an independent picture back then is near unrecognisable compared to the "indie" films of today, which more often than not are financed by different wings of the big studios, with slightly lower budgets but the same marquee names and stars you recognise from the blockbusters. Not only did the co-opting of the indie cinema title pretty much kill this new wave of cinema dead, but even Hollywood's bowdlerised version of it is starting to slip, as more money gets pumped into their huge summer flicks and less profits come out. In the past those profits went into making smaller, weirder films; but the less of that money there is, the less goes to such productions. So whilst the more interesting, art house fare lies dead in a ditch, Hollywood desperately shovels what meager box office takings they get into the next huge sequel/remake/reboot/adaptation, hoping this is the one that turns the whole thing around. They may as well be looking for Shangri-La. Or whatever was in the suitcase from Pulp Fiction.