Roger Ebert predicted the future of the movies in 1987

It would be hard to find anyone who would argue with the notion that Roger Ebert is perhaps the most influential film critic of our time (and with all of his tweets, blog posts and freelance essays, one of our  most prolific too). But it turns out that Ebert has also had an uncanny knack for predicting film's technological future too. Paleofuture dug up this fascinating excerpt from a 1987 interview with Ebert and the late Gene Siskel from Omni magazine, where Ebert weighed in on just how radically different the delivery and distribution of movies would be in the not-so-distant future. 

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, inhabiting a primitive world where the biggest movies of the moment were such cinematic fossils as "Three Men and a Baby" and "Beverly Hills Cop II," Ebert took a pretty impressive stab at swami-like crystal ball gazing:

We will have high-definition, wide-screen television sets and a push-button dialing system to order the movie you want at the time you want it. You'll not go to a video store but instead order a movie on demand and then pay for it. Videocassette tapes as we know them now will be obsolete both for showing prerecorded movies and for recording movies. People will record films on 8mm and will play them back using laser-disk/CD technology. I also am very, very excited by the fact that before long, alternative films will penetrate the entire country. Today seventy-five percent of the gross from a typical art film in America comes from as few as six --six-- different theaters in six different cities. Ninety percent of the American motion-picture marketplace never shows art films. With this revolution in delivery and distribution, anyone, in any size town or hamlet, will see the movies he or she wants to see.

OK, so the CD became DVD and 8mm didn't really go anywhere, but otherwise, Ebert got it pretty much right on the money. He also predicted that by 2000, people could be making movies for as little money as it costs to publish a book or make a record, which also turned out to be true, at least as long as you didn't hire James Cameron or Michael Bay as the director. 

Ebert's ideas look especially sagacious when you compare his prognostications to much-heralded futurists like Herman Kahn, who promoted the idea of a winnable nuclear war or Paul Ehrlich, whose famous "Population Bomb" doomsday thinking warned that hundreds of millions people would have died of starvation by now. As it turned out, most of those hundreds of millions of people are on Facebook helping overthrow their governments and watching cruddy Hollywood movies and TV shows on their smartphones. Maybe Afghanistan isn't Vietnam, maybe Newt Gingrich is really finally happily married and maybe "Arthur" won't be an unbearably pale imitation of the original, but isn't it funny how the future often turns out to be tacky and dispiriting, but rarely as awful as we think it will be?  

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Roger Ebert at work in his office at the WTTW-TV  studios in Chicago. Credit: Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press

Comments

[redfish]

@Dancing Scorpion: All the people who think they're smart, anyway.

Ebert didn't go out on a limb with any of his predictions, many people who knew the computer industry at the time said the same thing. There were already both online services and video data storage in 1987. You could buy CDs with sets of encyclopedias or books. Approaches to HD technology were already being experimented with. Moore's law said that computing power would increase.

Bill Gates made a speech about the same topic just three years later: http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/05/information_at.html (where he coined the phrase "information at your fingertips").

I don't know why this is a story at all.

[Patricia]

Millions of people have died of starvation.

[Really Really smart people]

"Good to see ole Rog uses an Apple. All the really smart people do..."

Really really smart people use Linux, as it's the safest OS system. Ubuntu, a form of Linux, is really easy to learn, and if you have programs that will only run in Windows, like Final Draft, you can load Vitualbox, install Windows, and run the program there - the point being is, to never have to connect to the internet through Windows, hence, no viruses. My Dell laptop with Ubuntu runs the same today as it did over 3 years ago when I purchased it.

"I am fully SICK of ebert. It is time he handed over the biz to younger and better movie pundits. WAAAY past time."

What the hell's your problem, dude. Show your elders some respect. While I may not always agree with his opinion, Ebert still rules. And you have to give him some respect for the expansion of his writing efforts since dealing with cancer.

[Joseph L Cooke]

"Please, Mr. Ebert, tell us that this ridiculous 3D craze is a passing fad.

Posted by: David | March 28, 2011 at 02:03 PM"

Mega-ditto on that.

[Derek]

dang dude... ebert's lookin pretty craze

[Calvinball]

d blane: There aren't many younger movie critics that are better than Ebert, though given the softness that he's shown in his old age (which he's admitted to), that's more an indictment of the film criticism establishment than a glowing praise of Ebert himself (though Ebert is a fantastic prosaist to the end, with nobody being able to take that away from him). Dan Schneider, whom Ebert praised in a blog post about a year ago, is almost surely the best of the "younger" critics (I use that term loosely, since he's in his forties), but he also has had trouble breaking into the mainstream critical establishment because he doesn't buy into the idea of criticism as de facto marketing, often savaging films well beyond what other critics are willing to do.

[Persephone]

Seriously, one compares Ebert to Ehrlich? First of all, one prediction is from 25 years ago, the other from 100. Second, while it's all well and good for movies, Ehrlich cured syphilis!! That's a really big deal, and these writers should get it through their heads that writing about a guy who writes about entertainment is about as useless as eating sand when you simultaneously mock a venerable scientist who did a lot more for the world they ever will.

[peaches]

Hate to break it to you, but Paul Ehrlich wasn't that far off, there are millions of people around the world dying of hunger, and with the population expected to increase to 9 billion in just 30 years, your smug comments will sound pretty ignorant when the rich have to live in fortresses protected by armed guards, while the rest of the world goes up in flames.

[Marco]

Amazing! But not really. Pay per view was around before Ebert said this.

Expand the bandwidth, or the number of channels (with the internet or cable) and you've got more selection. This was just common sense.

And of course there would be higher definition television and movies the resolution of TV from the 50s to the 80s had already gotten better, so why would they stop getting better? Furthermore, the advent of the VCR, several years before Ebert said this opened up audiences to art house movies. BTW, the laserdisk came out in the late 70s.

So, he simply extrapolated the present time and viola, got the future. Not that impressive.

Comparing him to futurists who make BIG predictions about society is really silly. I think you are cherry-picking your examples.

[Marco]

And yea, there still is a population bomb. We are already feeling the effects of it in subtle ways. Do you think that gas prices have an effect on food? Is oil completely independent of supply and demand. But wait, you are an insulated, rich American with easy access to food and other resources. Maybe the bomb prediction's date and sudden detonation was a little off, but, advancements in science have just delayed it lengthened its explosion.

Talk about insensitive.