Crystal Ball: Film in 25 Years

My Box office Predictions aren't turning out too well, so why should you believe my predictions of what film will look like in 25 years? Well, you shouldn't, but just for fun, have a read anyway:

More budget, more gross, more spectacle - Of the top 20 highest grossing films ever, 11 were made in the last three years alone. This can be attributed to studios' uber-blockbuster mentality and the inflation of ticket prices. As grosses increase, so will budgets. We've reached a stage where it's possible to to put anything on the big screen, it's only a matter of cost. Whereas the $150-$200 million movie was an anomaly, there have already been 3 $150+ million movies this year, and we're only half way through it.

Traditionally animated films will die off - an obvious prediction, but a noteworthy one nonetheless. Disney and Dreamworks have quit making them, and the last several traditionally animated movies have failed at the box office, while computer animated films are the most reliably successful genre ever. Anime will continue to succeed in Japan and elsewhere for years, but it, too, will run out of steam as Japanese and American cinema (and culture) continue to 'merge'. 2D animated films will become a rare stylistic choice, as black & white is today.

Independent films will enumerate - it's always getting cheaper to shoot and edit high-quality films. Thousand-dollar software has replaced million-dollar hardware editing suites. The upcoming Collateral was shot entirely on a digital camera: can you tell? Probably not. It looks gorgeous. Special effects, image manipulation, and 3D animation are cheaper, easier, and faster and will continue to move in that direction. All of these factors will allow for amateur auteurs to shine without studio budgets.

NC-17 will lose its stigma - before 2003, a studio had not released a single NC-17 feature for six years. In the last year alone there have been three: The Dreamers, Young Adam, and High Tension (not to mention the upcoming A Dirty Shame). Production companies are more daring now, willing to risk financial profit for freeing the NC-17 rating from its stigma, and audiences are beginning to feel more comfortable about seeing an NC-17 film. In 25 years, studio-released NC-17 features may be as common as a PG release is now.

CGI will replace environment, props, and actors - not completely, mind you, but the process will become more popular. In the Star Wars prequels and the upcoming Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Sin City, almost all the environments are CGI. In The Matrix: Reloaded, during Neo's fight with dozens of Smiths, the environment, props, and human actors were all replaced with computer-generated counterparts to allow the 'camera' to move with absolute freedom. Panic Room replaced things like cofee pots, chairs, and banisters with CGI counterparts for a memorably long and free-moving shot of thieves entering the house. As directors continue to seek new ways to make films look exactly the way they want them to, they'll replace more and more physical elements with their more flexible computer-generated counterparts, occasionally including even actors.