In the 2001 Ian Holm comedy "The Emperor's New Clothes"--look it up if you get the chance, and no, I'm not talking about the Disney movie--we're offered a whimsical what-if premise: Instead of dying in exile on the island of St. Helene, what if defeated ex-conqueror Napoleon had switched places with a lookalike commoner, in a plan to return and retake Paris?...But when the plan goes wrong, he finds himself stranded in modern 1820's post-Revolutionary Paris as an average citizen, thought to be one more lunatic every time he tries to tell the world the truth.
As our now anonymous citizen tries to find work and romance--and even organizes the street fruit-sellers with military strategy--he comes to realize the humiliating truth that years later, he's since become a quaint historical relic in his own country. The free democratic France he helped create has now grown and matured past him into a country of citizens simply struggling to get by in a nation of their own, have no more need of self-satisfying world conquerors, thank you, and are in no mood to hear the cannons of war start again.
Picking up the pieces from the would-be all-or-nothing, last-man-standing Digital vs. Physical war, we customers in the middle have become like those simple Parisians now: Home-theater has had a rough history over the last thirty-six years, born in war from the beginning. VHS battled Betamax, DVD battled DiVX before it could overcome VHS, and Blu-ray had to beat HDDVD to the bitter end before it could have a chance to blow away DVD. When DVD and Blu-ray's scheming Evil Twins hijacked the battle and represented threats to our very freedom, we rallied around the flag, and fought for principles of liberty and unity.
But we have two generations who've so grown up with movies in their home, they've never known a time when movies weren't--At the right age, our children are now shown Wizard of Oz on the family disk, with no TV station to show it every year, and if a revival shows up, parents take them to the theater to amaze them with what The Lion King or Star Wars looked like in their day, when it used to play on bigger screens. Home-theater simply was, and is.
Warner, armed with their experience of the past, believed that the next New Format would be forged in the fires of war...And of course, in format-war, there is only room for one, a Winner that becomes a wildfire overnight phenomenon, and a Loser that quickly blows away into the wind like dandelion seed, and is never heard from again. The latter is what they were chiefly interested in.
It was when that didn't happen that panic-mode set in: I was hanging around Warner's online customer-survey community at the time, and new-idea and customer-satisfaction surveys from the company were frequent. You can guess what most of them were about.
The sheer, disillusioned bafflement in their voice was unmistakable: Ultraviolet's fortunes were sinking, why hadn't we all caught on yet what a wonderful miracle it was (especially for the studio) to now preorder digital movies while they were still in theaters?...Didn't we KNOW?? Or had we just kept forgetting? Were we all just six years slow on the uptake? Was it simply that someone had neglected to tell us yet for our own good, and the truth hadn't yet set us free?
Later, I was shown their survey findings that a majority of new voice-activated-device users were using theirs mostly to listen to their music collections, set reminders and seek quick information on the Internet...Wait, does that mean they weren't using it to sit on the couch, say "Entertain me, Alexa!" and call up a recent hit Friday-night movie rental at random, like in all those Amazon ads?
In Warner's surveys of my customer-interest in digital libraries--which also became more and more often, the more that Blu-ray wasn't falling down yet on schedule and going plotz overnight as much as Marketing predicted it would, and they felt they hadn't hit on just the right sales avenue yet (maybe if they sold movie downloads on Gamestop gift cards?)--the question would often come up, "How many Ultraviolet digital movies are in your library collection?" Followed by itemizing "How many were A) purchased, B) redeemed with free disk codes, C) promotional bonus/gifts?"
I had to answer truthfully: In order, I had 43 movies and 1 TV series in my collection. 23 of those were redeemed from free codes--that I'd received from, ahem, BUYING the DISKS!--and 19 were free promotional bonus/gifts. They should know, most of those promotional gifts were from Warner, trying to get me hooked on the new convenience of Flixster. I did buy one with real money, yes...An iTunes downloadable file of Eddie Murphy in "The Haunted Mansion", back in 2007 when we all were all playing with our new Apple Video iPods, and it'd somehow stayed on my Apple-account library ever since.
In fan conversations where I tried to explain whether I was fundamentally Fer or Agin' the idea of Digital, I simply explained that I saw it as a tool, for one specific situation I didn't normally encounter: I might use Vudu or Amazon to Friday-movie-night rent some recent hit I'd missed in theaters rather than go to Redbox, but didn't really do anything with my library, since my living-room TV was already next to my disk shelf. But, that I could see an online collection conceivably coming in handy for an emergency someday, if--let's be generous for the sake of argument and say IF--I was ever, say, stuck at the airport with a delayed flight for six hours with free WiFi. Otherwise, since I wasn't a regular Amtrak commuter, or wasn't usually sitting in some public WiFi hot-spot for two hours when I left the house, I didn't really, y'know, see the point of having it in any other situation.
Last February '17, I was coming home from a cruise vacation, had no idea that the entire Northeastern seaboard was being socked with a major storm, that my flight home was delayed, and that I'd be stranded at Orlando Int'l airport with my iPad from 11am to 8pm, with free WiFi. Well, what can I say?...I did ASK for it.
Between naps and app-games, I enjoyed a rather nice afternoon in the airport's rechargeable comfy-chair islands and food-courts with headphones on, watching "The Avengers". (Er, the original '67 Patrick Macnee/Diana Rigg TV series, that is, that I'd gotten from my free Blu-ray code, not the '99 Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman movie.) And if it makes Warner feel any better, it did come in handy.
When it was useful, digital became a tool, nothing more or less. A tool is what you use to solve a problem: You can't build a house without a hammer and saw, but you can't simply decide that they're more useful than a house, and sleep on them.
We were asked to buy digital libraries because, well, digital was just better, is all--Yet in trying to hook us on sweet sugar by including "Digital Copy" in every Blu-ray disk, what the studios taught us was the very lesson they believed was impossible under the Darwin rules of their industry, and were strategically trying to eliminate: Co-existence. Harmony. Infinite movies in infinite diversity. Peace on earth, and goodwill to rival formats. A movie can exist in two different forms...Three, if you ever actually used the DVD copy. (I never did.)
The strategy may have in fact, ultimately backfired on the studios--Since we would get the digital with the disk combo anyway, why not simply buy the disk, and get TWO things for your buck instead of one? The digital copy would probably serve some purpose later, but for now, hey, it was Free Stuff. If we ever sat down and thought when on earth we'd ever need to use the digital-copy, it only brought up the idea that there would be different situations when we might want to watch something. And the right job would need the right tool.
Warner knew how to sell their movies, but it had lost any personal, emotional, or sentimental connection for why we bought one in the first place--What was left of the DRM industry was turned over to a new service that didn't want to remake the universe in its image, but just round up a place for confused folks to find them. When we were asked, "But don't you understand how wonderful it is to let us take care of them for you?", the response, en masse, was "NO. They're our movies now. You can't have them back."
That became one of the chief battle cries when disk users were under attack. But with no more enemy at the door, should it still be a militant fist in the air? It never hurts to be secure, but to bring peace, we have to learn how to beat that one sword into a plowshare, and see it as our freedom: Yes, they're our movies now...They always were. They're a part of our lives, for whatever reason we keep them. They can be any way we want to see them, in the way we want to see them, as long as that option remains available. If we want more, there is no reason to deny us more; if some want less, less must not be enforced upon everyone. We can watch in high definition in our living room recliner with commentary and 2-hour documentary, we can watch it in 4K on an 80" home-theater or on Blu-ray on a 40" set, we can stream it out of curiosity on a Netflix subscription, or we can keep a download on a tablet at the airport waiting for our flight.
And as long as we can, movies will live--That's all that should matter for posterity. But take away that freedom, and movies will die the same way all stories can die: We forget them.
And will we forget them? That depends on us. It depends on what the idea of being able to find movies, old, new, the first ones we saw as kids, or from before our parents were born, means to us, and how willing we are to do it. On whether we can define what having a movie, or keeping a movie, or discovering a movie, or infecting a beloved newbie with a favorite movie, or taking one home that you found, even from a weekend rental, means, and what that means to us whether or not someone tries to cut a few red-ink costs by taking that away. We've got to do that hard work ourselves, because we're now building up again from what's become the scorched-earth of somebody else's battlefield.
Once we figure that out for ourselves and build something on that again, no one will ever again be able to sell us any other idea--Because what we build there will also be ours.
And a defeated conqueror with his one dream to improve the world and accept its thanks, will have to resign itself to a life of simple, anonymous usefulness, as it can only stand and stare at the faraway shores of a world that is no longer theirs to conquer.
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