Scuffle Over On-Demand Movies Portends Battles to Come

Hollywood is picking sides for its first all-out brawl since its writers’ labor feud in 2007. And oddly, Christopher Dodd, once a powerful senator from Connecticut and now the film studios’ chief spokesman, has mostly been out of the fray.

The blow-up is between studios and theater owners over a plan to slip some movies into homes through on-demand video shortly after they arrive in theaters. For Dodd, the new chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, it is the first industry crisis since he started in late March. Dodd acknowledges that both his relative inexperience and the need to stay out of business decisions made by individual studios has kept him largely out of the battle. “Each company has to make up its own mind.” Studios, exhibitors and filmmakers are arguing about the future of the business, and whether people in coming years will be more likely to watch movies in theaters or in increasingly sophisticated home setups mimicking the quality, immediacy and, perhaps, cost, of today’s theatrical experience. Last week, four studios — Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, and Warner Brothers — took the first step in their arrangement with DirecTV to release films two months after their theatrical release. The first premium on-demand offering came on Thursday, as DirecTV offered Sony’s “Just Go With It,” with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, for $30. Two dozen filmmakers, including James Cameron and Peter Jackson, fired back with an open letter criticizing the experiment as a threat to theaters. The fight separated allies who had recently joined to spend billions of dollars to upgrade theaters for digital and 3-D projection, and had used their combined political might to thwart proposed trading in a financial exchange based on box office revenue. The rift underscores how little Dodd or anyone else can do to buffer the jolts in a film business where the greatest challenges are not the labor disputes or public policy battles that were wrangled by past Hollywood statesmen like the MCA chairman Lew R. Wasserman or the long-serving MPAA chief Jack Valenti.