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Mark Cuban's Newest High Def Play

'Enron' Points to Movie Theaters' Future

Michael Stroud
04.27.05

Billionaire Mark Cuban owns high-def TV services HDNet and HDNet Movies. He also owns media company 2929 Entertainment, whose subsidiaries include art house chain Landmark Theatres and film distributor Magnolia Pictures.

Last week, the connection between HDNet and 2929 became clear. Magnolia simultaneously launched Alex Gibney's original high-def documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” on HDNet Movies and Landmark theaters in Houston and New York .

Cuban plans to release a whole raft of inexpensively produced high-def movies simultaneously on television and in movie theaters.

That defies conventional Hollywood wisdom. You always go to movies first, DVDs and TV next.

Here's more defiance: This summer, he's planning to install six state-of-the-art digital projectors in his Landmark theaters, on the way to equipping all 59 theaters in his nationwide chain. You're supposed to put $93,000 projectors in big theaters that play “Star Wars, Episode 3”, not little art houses.

But Cuban is thinking digitally, not traditionally.

Here's his reasoning. Many independent filmmakers and documentary directors already shoot in digital video because filming, producting and editing is less expensive than film. Landmark plays independent films. Why not skip the expensive process of transferring digital video to celluloid so that a movie can be played in a conventional theater?

Now, here's another piece. Everything HDNet shoots for its television audience is high-def. How hard is it to transfer its digital broadcasts to Landmark Theaters?  For that matter, how hard is it for Mark Cuban to air his beloved Dallas Mavericks basketball team's games in a Landmark Theater?

The answer is: Not hard at all. And there you have the future of theater.

Theaters cost a lot to build and are under-utilized. The true potential of digital projection lies in its ability to turn theaters such as Landmark into nexuses for airing digitally produced film, television broadcasts, sports events – even company Powerpoint presentations.

Let's not get overly excited. Digital cinema has been heralded for years and is still a negligible factor in theaters worldwide. Most Hollywood films are still shot with film, and many directors and cinematographers will consider nothing else.

But entrepreneurs such as Mark Cuban offer an exciting glimpse of possibilities beyond Hollywood . Many talented filmmakers are shut out of the tight distribution link between big studios and theater chains. It's virtually impossible to persuade a big theater to take a chance on an independent project without a studio's marketing clout.

But an art house, with much lower operating costs and ties to the local community just might. And you don't necessarily need $93,000 projectors for those places, either. Sony sells a projector for home theaters with excellent resolution for $30,000, comparable to what you'd pay to outfit a conventional theater.

That's an interesting contrast to “Star Wars, Episode 3”, also shot in high-def, presumably costing well in excess of $100 million to make, and showing only in big, mainstream theaters.

It's curious that, while Hollywood still plays with film, home owners are already creating HDTV systems that rival the quality of the movie theaters studios patronize. And Cuban is playing both sides of the fence. – With reporting by Gary Dretzka.

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