“Vir­tu­al cin­e­mas” aim to take US art­house the­aters online – and into the future

As many indus­tries attempt to adjust to the rapid­ly, con­tin­u­ous­ly chang­ing real­i­ty ush­ered in by the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, out­side-the-box think­ing has been called for. The inde­pen­dent sec­tor of the film indus­try in par­tic­u­lar, not real­ly a mon­ey-healthy busi­ness to begin with, has had to get resource­ful to remain oper­a­tional through this major glob­al turbulence.

The deci­sion-mak­ers at Kino Lor­ber may have devised a stop­gap solu­tion with poten­tial for life beyond cri­sis. It’s called Kino Mar­quee, a stream­ing ser­vice that indi­vid­ual the­aters can license as part of their own web site. Cur­rent­ly only avail­able in North Amer­i­ca, it allows home­bound cus­tomers to watch new titles too under-the-radar for the major stream­ing play­ers to snatch up, and sup­port tem­ples to cin­e­ma as they hit dire straits.

It’s a sim­ple yet effec­tive strat­e­gy: Kino’s own site hosts the video, with each the­ater link­ing to the pro­gram­ming from their sites. When some­one pur­chas­es a tick­et for, say, Bacu­rau (one of the most well-known titles cur­rent­ly in rota­tion on the ser­vice), half of the price goes to Kino and half goes to the theater.

One would hope that the dip in prof­it-per-tick­et will be bal­anced out by a greater num­ber of users, cur­rent­ly left with no oth­er options. Just like back in the before-times, each the­ater hand-picks which movies they’ll show, and they run for a finite amount of time before get­ting replaced by some­thing fresh. (A full sched­ule by the­ater can be found here.)

One hun­dred and fifty bricks-and-mor­tar cin­e­mas have signed on, includ­ing the think­ing man’s art­house chain Alamo Draft­house, tak­ing this from a gut­sy exper­i­ment to some­thing close to the next iter­a­tion of our sta­tus quo. The selec­tions won’t even be lim­it­ed to Kino Lor­ber releas­es, with Mag­no­lia plac­ing their Roman­ian thriller The Whistlers right along­side oth­er indies, imports, and documentaries.

The con­cept of a ​“vir­tu­al cin­e­ma,” a for­mer pie-in-the-sky nov­el­ty idea, has quick­ly hard­ened into a nec­es­sary real­i­ty. Kino Now already has com­pe­ti­tion; Alamo uses them to show Bacu­rau, for instance, but goes through com­peti­tor Film Move­ment Plus for Diao Yinan​‘s The Wild Goose Lake, while Film at Lin­coln Cen­ter works with dis­trib­u­tor Grasshop­per direct­ly to stream their lat­est release Vitali­na Varela.

All of which is to say that it’s a messy econ­o­my, but for con­sumers, that means healthy com­pe­ti­tion. The world spins onward – we see new movies.