Cinema has had a good year. The Scotsman reports:
FUTURE-gazers claimed 20 years ago that it would be doomed by the arrival of the home video recorder.
And more recently they’ve been claiming that the internet is killing the entertainment industry. So how do they explain the following two paragraphs?
But figures released yesterday reveal that the cinema is set to enjoy a golden 2007 in the UK, with the largest number of visits to film theatres in 40 years.
The wettest summer on record and a slew of blockbuster sequels led to 50.8 million visits to UK cinemas between June and August.
This is despite the fact that people are supposedly killing cinema by downloading pirate films from the internet. This surely suggests that the entertainment industry has got it wrong when it points at the internet for its failings. This summer shows that the film industry should spend less time running scared of the internet, and more time simply giving people what they want.