The Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Goldstein has long been a savvy observer of the motion picture business.  In this essay, he explores Hollywood’s future as technological change sweeps through the business.

Newsflash: This is the last RoadMAP until Labor Day.  It’s time for a vacation.

Can Hollywood Keep Hanging On To Its Aging Business Model?
Everywhere you look in the entertainment world these days, you see more and more people crossing the digital divide, using a staggering array of new devices to read books, watch TV shows, listen to music and,  yes, even read the newspaper. Amazon recently announced that it now sells more e-books than it does hardcover editions. No one seems to watch regular TV shows when they actually air, either saving them on TiVo, as I do, or watching them on Hulu, as my son does.
When Arcade Fire’s new album, “The Suburbs,” debuted last week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, 62% of the album’s sales were as digital downloads, more than twice as many as the band’s last album had in its first week of release in 2007. The same thing is happening with newspaper readers, as Web traffic keeps increasing as print circulation continues to drop.
The one business that seems largely immune to all this dramatic change is the movie business. In Hollywood, the maxim seems to be: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Even though DVD revenues are in decline, movie theater revenue is up again this year (though actual attendance is down slightly) as people continue to flock to see films the way the industry wants them to–in theaters with big screens and popcorn at the concession stand. While nearly everything is different about the way we now consume much of our music, TV and news, the moviegoing experience is largely unchanged from the way our grandparents saw films 75 years ago.

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Los Angeles Times