Directors deal to keep Kodak movie film in production

[johncox]

<p>It looks like a few directors and Hollywood studios are teaming up to keep Kodak making movie film. I make the occasional order for Kodak Double X so this is welcome news.<br>

http://www.dpreview.com/articles/6071961044/hollywood-studios-strike-deal-to-keep-kodak-movie-film-in-production?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=generic</p>

[c_watson1]

<p>The bar chart in the WSJ article isn't exactly cause for celebration.</p>

[john_shriver]

<p>That's mostly the catastrophic falloff in the sales of the "ECP" films -- Eastman Color Print -- used for release prints to send to movie theatres. With most theatres having been forced to install digital projectors to be able to show 3-D films, there aren't many film release prints anymore.<br>

Sales of ECN (Eastman Color Negative) used in the cameras were probably under 10% of the total Eastman movie film sales. ECP was always Eastman's "bread and butter."<br>

The directors still want the look of ECN, and of course of the B&W stocks when they shoot in black & white.<br>

The studios still know that they need the archival separation films Eastman makes to make safety prints of the final films. (They don't trust digital storage for the long term.)<br>

So after almost destroying Eastman Kodak, now they realize they have to keep them alive. But it will be an ongoing war between the accountants ("let Kodak die") and the artists/directors/directors-of-photography.<br>

If we lose Eastman, we also lose the ability to make new release prints of movies that have not been digitally scanned. There's a lot of films that have not been digitized to even DVD quality, to mention Blu-Ray quality (which is barely sufficient for digital projection). It would be the end of repertory movie theatres as the old prints wear out.</p>

[Colin O]

<p>There was a thread here last year with some discussion related to this. Ron Andrews shared some interesting information relating to movie print film vs movie negative film and the fact that negative film was (is?) relatively much more profitable for Kodak than print film. (But seeing as how, according to Ron, Kodak sold maybe 600 times as much print film as negative film, those smaller profits on print film would of course have added up to something significant.)<br>

<a href="http://www.photo.net/film-and-processing-forum/00bwCE">

http://www.photo.net/film-and-processing-forum/00bwCE</a></p>

[john_shriver]

<p>The big problem for Kodak was that their production line is sized to make lots and lots of low-margin ECP film. They're not making much of that anymore, and that's where the pain is. There's a huge fixed cost (including steep property, plant, and equipment taxes) that doesn't go away.<br>

I'm sure ECP is much higher-margin, as were most of the consumer films.</p>