Once again we’ve got a studio pleading poverty due to piracy–well, to be fair, they’re also blaming the most miserable economic conditions in eighty years.  But the end result is the same for Sony Pictures, who just showed four hundred and fifty people to the door by telling them they’ll be fired this March.

Give them some credit for at least giving them advance warning, but still.

And it’s true–there’s a lot more competition out there than there used to be.  Between video stores and video kiosks and DVD by mail and streaming video and a host of less-than-legal channels, there’s more ways than ever to get content and do so at vastly reduced prices.

Of course, the studio system isn’t much helping–no one’s worth twenty five million dollars a movie.  But it’s the combination of costs that remain fairly static or increase and the revenues that are steadily falling off that’s hurting Sony’s studio arm.  But what does this mean for us?  Check out what no less than Francis Ford Coppola had to say about this.  From CNET:

Francis Ford Coppola, “The Godfather” director, said at the Beirut Film Festival last year that he expected some of the studios would go out of business.

“The cinema as we know it,” Coppola said, “is falling apart.”

What this means to us is that we, the home theater buffs, are the wave of the future, folks.  With more ways than ever to get content, shrinking video release windows, and the rise of streaming technology, watching a movie at home has never been so simple.  Over on our sister site, Screenhead, we’ve been talking about the future of cinema in a seven part series–you guys might want to have a look at it.

I say here what I said there–the home theater is the future of cinema.