Just over twelve years ago, I went into cinemas in Brazil as a "supplier", and
It gave me a privileged view of the movie business. I don't have the slightest pretension of
consider a great connoisseur or expert in this market - this position is occupied with
exhibitioners with decades of cinema and professionals much more qualified than I - but me
I feel able to analyze new scenarios - post-covid?? - and understand how cinema can be
transform and update from a technological point of view in order to deliver an experience
better for customers increasingly eager for innovation.
In those twelve years representing Christie in Brazil, I participated in numerous projects: from
multiplex shopping in the capital to street cinema that resists in the interior. By the way, I've flown and driven
for hours, sometimes, to visit a customer with only one room... and if I had to summarize
what I learned in a sentence, this would be: the audience could never explain why it stopped going to the
cinema, but I have a good idea when this started.
It started when the rooms got old inside.
Silent degradation
The digitization of the Brazilian display park, completed around 2014, was sold as a
point of arrival. In practice, it was a starting point - and many people parked in it.
Projectors with xenon lamp were installed with exuberant brightness and, film after film,
They've been losing performance. Lamp is a consumable: it loses light, costs expensive, and the
temptation to extend your service life beyond recommended is huge when the box office squeezes.
The result I have seen with my own eyes countless times: rooms projecting with half the
brightness specified by the DCI, 3D sessions so dark that the glasses looked like welder -
why, even, I convinced a displayer to install our first laser projector in the
Brazil - washed colors and contrast practically nonexistent.
The viewer can't measure foot-lamberts. But he knows that "the cinema isn't that anymore."
He doesn't technically complain - he just won't come back. And while you're not coming back, there's a
chance he buys an 85-inch TV with a LED panel that ironically delivers
more brightness and more contrast than many commercial rooms out there.
We, exhibitors and vendors, spent years discussing launch and streaming windows
As if they were the only villains, while one of the most embarrassing villains was in.
from our own cabin.
What the pandemic has spread
In 2020, the rooms closed and when they reopened, we discovered something uncomfortable: the public
He did not return by habit; he returned by event. He went back to Avatar, to Barbie, Oppenheimer,
Spider-Man and so many other films that have become subject or trend.
Cinema is no longer the standard weekend program and has become a much more choice
conscious - and a conscious choice requires experience to justify it.
Think to me: if a person leaves the house, pays for parking, popcorn and ticket, so does she.
You're making an emotional investment. Give her a dark image, an armchair
worn and noisy and a tired or distorted sound is not operational economy: it is
You're breaking trust. And broken trust, for the new generations, often does not generate
complaint - generates silence and an empty seat forever.
I still remember a maxim I heard when I was working on an airline, 25.
years ago, "unflyed pole never comes back." I believe faithfully that the same
logic applies to cinema.
Laser is not an upgrade, but a repositioning
This is where the part that still consumes me comes in. The transition from xenon to RGB laser is,
in my reading, the greatest opportunity of repositioning that the brazilian displayer has in
hands since the scan.
Not because the laser is modern - modernity, alone, does not sell ticket
automatically - but for three very concrete reasons.
First, consistency. The laser delivers consistent brightness from the opening session to thousands
of hours of operation.
Second, real economy. No periodic lamp exchange and power consumption
significantly lower, the operating cost falls in a way that any financial director
You understand in the first spreadsheet. Programs such as Cinema Rental, which we developed
pioneeringly in 2023, today they allow to renew the projection park without suffocating the box.
Third - and, for me, most importantly -: RGB laser returns to the room something that home TV
cannot reproduce on the same scale: color volume, brightness and visual impact on a screen
giant, turning the image itself into a marketing argument.
Real color, real black, 3D that finally looks 3D.
I usually play with our customers and friends that nobody posts a story on the lamp
new projector. But a lot of people comment on leaving a room with RGB laser projection:
"I've never seen an image like this."
I was able to prove that when we installed a 4K projector in a Curitiba cinema for the
Avengers premiere: Infinite War. Technology becomes truly disruptive
when it causes this type of reaction to the consumer.
Tools are all available
The displayer who wants to contest people's attention in 2027 and in the following years will need
Up-to-date and the arsenal exists.
Laser image calibrated and maintained over time, because install well and abandon after
It's throwing money away. Periodic maintenance and recalibration are as strategic as
It's a buy-out. Find competent technicians and keep them close.
immersive sound that makes the room vibrate in a way that a headset can't
reproduce. Premium formats and concept rooms that justify a larger average ticket.
And relationship. I'm one of those who believe that intelligent loyalty programs and
signature can turn the eventual viewer into a frequenter. Because frequency if
builds with reward, recurrence and constancy - not only with calendar of
Launches.
None of this is a theory to me. That's what I discuss every week with displayers of all doors and
That's what keeps me optimistic after 12 years of hearing that the movies are going to die.
The cinema won't die. The poor-quality cinema will suffer and, in time, die.
What motivates me
I could close with an effect phrase on the magic of the big screen, but I prefer
Finish with a scene.
Last year, during a commissioning in an inland city, we installed a
New laser projector in a room that operated for years with the lamp at the limit. One
Employee, a man who's been working in film since the time of the film, stood still.
looking at the test screen and whispered:
"I'd forgotten it was like this. That's why I do what I do.
The Brazilian public has not abandoned the cinema - he is waiting for the cinema to be again
what you remember. And for the first time in a long time, we have all the tools
to deliver this. All that's left is the decision to use them.
Ricardo Laporta is a commercial director and co-founder of Neolux Cinema and representative of Christie
Cinema in Brazil.
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