Will today's cheaper, more accessible technology for making movies end up disrupting the big studios?

It does bring movie-creation within reach of a great many more people; and disruptive distribution channels are also growing (amazon; netflix; even appleTV/iTunes; plus the growing "home theater"), as alternatives to movie theaters.

The question is consumers: they have access to movies made with the highest level of technical expertise, screenplays, character actors, stars, franchises, marketing - and movies are cheap to rent already (plus, piracy drops their price to zero). Why would consumers select one of these indie movies over the major studio movies? In a head-on comparison for the mainstream, these indie movies would seem to have everything stacked against them.

But indie movies aren't new, and there has always been a niche for them - just not the mainstream. What is changing is their quality is increasing. What they really need is slightly bigger niches, where their non-big-studio qualities offset their not having all those other advantages. Do these bigger-niches exist?

I'm not sure that they do. Even foreign language fims - made to very high standards, with huge niches - are regularly remade by hollywood, and with much greater commercial success in the mainstream. When people pirate movies, they seem to pirate mainstream movies, not indie ones...

Here's what I think will happen: as soon as any film-maker gets a foothold of some success, he will be co-opted by the big studios - as they have done with the idea of an indie film (notice how "indie" films often have big name actors in them these days?) They are still masters of the value networks for making mainstream movies: theaters, stars, marketing.

Technology isn't the main commercial barrier to making movies, so reducing it doesn't undermine their business.

What could change it is:

(1) if there were customers who prefer the indie films, because they are more accessible or cheaper. But everyone can access films, and privacy makes them free - denying indie entry.

(2) or if, even without a nurturing niche, indie films could become of such high quality (according to the mainstream) that they could take business away from the big studios. This would provoke a fierce competitive response from the studios, and they have so much non-technical power that it seems unlikely.

What can happen is disruption of the traditional distribution channels of video rentals (there's bankruptcies there already I think).

But probably not theaters (people like the theater partly because it is not home - they are going out - there's the energy of a mass of people; a different environment/atmosphere etc). Maybe cheaper projection equipment will change the way it's done (e.g. there are now complexes that show many more films, in smaller theaters), and that may disrupt traditional chains to some extent, as discount stores disrupted department store. But I don't think so: theaters have always been priced so that everyone can afford them; I guess what might change is accessibility, with small theaters opening up locally. But this niche is already filled; those small theaters can just upgrade their equipment and keep making money in the same way - the cheaper technology is a sustaining innovation for them. Unless someone works out a way to use it disruptively... (maybe showing more films, more recently, at cheaper prices, by using smaller theaters).