Japan's cinema world is now undergoing its greatest transformation since the introduction of "talkie" and color films. It has been learned recently that 10 major cinema complex firms, which cover some 70 percent of the roughly 3,300 movie screens in Japan, are expected to complete the introduction of digital projection equipment by the summer of 2013 at the latest. Digitization of movie production, distribution and showing is inevitable. But people in the movie world should consider what problems digitization may have.
Digitization has been accelerated by the adoption of a unified digital format in 2005 by Hollywood movie companies. The strong point of digitization is the cheaper cost of production and distribution. Printing many films for use at movie theaters will become unnecessary and piracy can be prevented. Production of three-dimensional images will become easy.
But it will cost about ¥10 million per screen to install equipment such as digital servers and projectors. This will cause financial difficulty for independent movie houses in the countryside. At a symposium held in Tokyo in late June whose participants included owners of independent movie theaters, a financial plan was announced in which major movie distributing firms will shoulder two-thirds of movie theaters' digitization cost.