'Tis the week for controversy on cinema screens this week.  Of the three significant films hitting screens this week one (Brooklyn's Finest) will almost certainly appear and disappear without much of anyone noticing, but the other two find themselves at the center of very different controversies.

Now, I'm not all that interested in going into Ghost Writer and the whole Roman Polanski issue. There's just nothing left to say about that that hasn't already been said many times over. He's in custody now, the courts will sort it out and that's the end of that. Much more significant, though, and getting much less play is the storm swirling around Disney and their handling of Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland. Good film/bad film doesn't much factor in here as there are larger issues at play that could have serious implications for the industry as a whole.

Here's the thing. Don't let the box office take fool you, it was only a record year because of increased ticket prices. Actual number of admissions is down, a frightening percentage of the big blockbusters are failing, and Hollywood is flat out terrified. And rather than placing the blame on their own shitty scripts -- where most of the blame belongs -- the industry is largely blaming piracy, which certainly is a significant issue but not as big as they make it out to be.

This fear of piracy is the dominant driving force behind the move to 3D technology. Take a video camera into a theatre and try to record a 3D movie and all you get is a big, blurry mess. The only way to see a 3D film right now is in the theatre or, with improved TV technology coming down the line any day now, via official DVD and BluRay releases. The adoption of 3D isn't really about improving the viewer experience -- which is why Hollywood doesn't care about the mounting evidence scientifically linking 3D technology to headaches and eye strain -- but about keeping fourteen your old kids from taping films and putting them on the internet for other fourteen year old kids to download.

But 3D isn't the only way the industry is tackling the problem. For the past couple years the smaller indie labels have been experimenting with traditional movie release windows -- first by narrowing the gap between theatrical and DVD release, then by eliminating it altogether with day-and-date release patterns that see films released on screen and DVD simultaneously, and now by actually releasing films on VOD before putting them on screens. The thinking is that if you make legal, low cost streams available to people in small town America where they don't have a prayer of a theatrical release anyway and if you do it before pirate versions make their way online, people will pay (and pay pretty happily) for the legit version. It's a good concept and it's working, with the companies that led the way in this sort of thing -- IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures -- both now doing significantly more VOD business than theatrical and DVD combined.

It didn't take long for Hollywood to notice and, with Alice In Wonderland, Disney decided to try an experiment of their own and announced that they were shortening the normal 'Theater Only' guarantee to exhibitors from the customary sixteen weeks to twelve. Their hope is that by slashing four weeks off of the gap from screen to DVD they'll be able to get a jump on the pirates and make more legitimate sales. Twelve weeks is still loads of time for a movie to be in theaters so they figured they'd be fine.

Wrong.

Exhibitors threw a fit. What Disney forgot is that the powers behind Magnolia -- owned by Mark Cuban, who also owns the Dallas Mavericks -- also own their own theater chain, which allows them to do whatever they want with total impunity while IFC books only very limited runs in independent theaters happy to have any sort of business whatsoever. By contrast, Disney -- and every other major studio -- are completely dependent on major exhibition chains. And exhibitors, feeling the pinch both of piracy and legitimately purchased Blu-Ray and the rise of ultra high end home theaters that mimic or better all the best bits of the theatrical experience with none of the irritating parts at a significantly lower cost, do not welcome anything that will encourage audiences to wait to buy or rent a DVD or Blu-Ray for a fraction of the cost of taking a family to the theater. And their fear is that any reduction of the release window will do exactly that: The smaller the window is, the less incentive there is to rush out to see it on the big screen. Remember when it took a year or more for a movie to hit DVD? Theatres would like to go back to those days.

Here in North America the theatre chains squawked but buckled pretty easily. In the UK and across Europe however, it was a totally different story. The two biggest theater chains -- Odeon and Pathe -- pretty much told Disney to shove their release plans up their ass and refused to screen the film at all, a major problem when the big premiere was scheduled to be held at an Odeon theater, a ban Pathe extended to their entire chain across Europe.

This all resolved itself in the past couple days with all the major chains reversing their position after "extended talks" with Disney (read: Disney offered them a better percentage of the takings), a move certain to trigger release pattern changes across all of the major studios. This means faster DVD and Blu-Ray releases for you and I and, I would wager, further closing of the release window and more experimentation with alternate release mechanisms like VOD. For those who want their blockbusters and want them now, this is probably a good thing as it'll get them to you faster while also enabling the studios to actually make their money back and keep making more of the damn things. What this will mean ultimately for exhibitors is less clear but it could very well cancel out all the gains they had just made with the rise of 3D, which has undoubtedly drawn people back to the big screen for a unique experience. The losers, though, will almost certainly be the independent and international films and fans, those segments having already been driven out of the mainstream theaters almost entirely. VOD has been their domain so far, the films able to find an audience there partly because VOD has been treated as an afterthought by Hollywood so far.

This is going to change that and once the big studios decide they want to dominate something they're pretty ruthless in squeezing out everyone else...