This will be the first in a series of essays detailing 'the year in film', spotlighting certain trends (mostly positive, I'm taking a break from complaining for a bit) of the nearly finished year. Obviously I can't amass a best-of list until I see a few more alleged gems, mainly Les Miserables and Django Unchained, but I can start a retrospective of the movie year that was 2012. Normally when a film opens with $3,181 on three screens it's considered a pretty big flop. Yet this past weekend saw the theatrical release of the surprisingly very good Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, which marked the proverbial end of a seemingly successful run on pre-theatrical video on demand. I say 'seemingly' because studios aren't yet releasing the proverbial grosses of films on this format, even ones that debut on VOD prior to theatrical release (Bachelorette made news as the top iTunes download on its opening week, but we have yet to know how much money that is). It's release followed on the heels of Barry Levinson's The Bay, which is quite frankly the scariest American horror film I have seen since Frank Darabont's The Mist. It opened in theaters and VOD on the same day and earned a whopping $30,000 during a two-week theatrical run. Following the somewhat surprising VOD performance of Margin Call, which debuted day-and-date in theaters and VOD and rang up decent numbers on both formats (the $3.5 million picture earned $16 million worldwide in theaters), 2012 has seen an explosion of pre-theatrical and/or day-and-date theatrical/VOD content like never before. The sheer amount of content, relatively high-quality content, available on VOD amounts to a second film release schedule.
