ABSTRACT
Going to see a film is still an event, however, the nature of which will be discussed in Chapter 5. But it is not a discrete event. Until quite recently, film audiences had been in decline in most western countries. The establishment of broadcast and then cable television, the development of the VCR, and the adaptation of the computer to home and leisure use, exposed the feature film to a highly competitive, multimedia marketplace. As producers competed for a shrinking market, many changes in industry practices occurred. These changes serially affected an individual film's place in its cultural context. First, the industry's concentration of its resources on the blockbuster - the aggressively promoted big-budget movie with high production values, big stars, massive simultaneous release patterns, and, increasingly, expensive special effects - has made it harder for more modest films to gain publicity or even distribution. Despite frequent examples of such modest films succeeding at the box-office - these would include Hollywood productions such as My Best Friend's Wedding as well as non-American independent productions such as The Full Monty (which cost $US2.5 million to make and returned more than $US250 million at the box office) - the industry has been particularly cautious in choosing projects to support. This caution has not, however, extended to the amount of money spent on the projects chosen.
