Everything has been integrated into an “ipad” for the most part, and I’ve noticed a huge change in viewing patterns over the past few years.  Previously you had to watch a movie/TV program ON a TV, or computer monitor, or laptop.  Now you can watch a movie on your Iphone/Android phone, or on an ipad, or android, or Windows 8 device.

This means that all of the other crap Best Buy used to sell is pretty much redundant for the most part.  Yeah, you can go out and buy a $300 camcorder and get a slightly better picture than your iphone, but you can’t take that camcorder with you everywhere.  Same goes for MP3 players, and any other gadget.  They all become superfluous if the consumer owns an “iphone” like device.

Furthermore, there is huge shift away from physical media.  Nobody wants dvds anymore except to rent them at REDBOX.  Nobody’s buying Blu-Rays except for “old movies,” and those people that do buy Blu-Rays are doing to show off their system, the few people that still care about picture and sound quality.

But for the most part, people don’t care anymore about screen size, they care about convenience.

The real culprit is Hollywood itself.  We’re halfway through the year and I’ve only seen a handful of movies actually worth seeing at the theater, probably less than one a month.  The rest are totally garbage.  TOTAL TRASH.  It used to be Hollywood could make a crappy movie, dump it on home video and turn a small profit.  But with the erosion of home video and the explosion of what amounts to be too many choices of entertainment, means that these crappy movies are now going unseen by most.

But film is dead because there are no longer any filmmakers.  Sure, you’ve got your Scotts, your Nolans, and your Coen Bros., but the true filmmakers are a dying breed.  Christopher Nolan just said yesterday that he’ll never use digital, he’ll always use film.  That’s fine… until film isn’t available anymore.  But “film” goes beyond just filming things. 

Previously, if you wanted to film some grand vista shot, it had to (mostly) exist in the real world.  Today actors show up on set and even the %%*#&@* FLOOR is a damn greenscreen!  Nothing on the entire set is real.  Film has become a choreography of composition of 3D images and special effects.

It’s weird, I remember watching “Terminator 2″ and “Jurassic Park” and were amazed at how well the computer graphic creations fit in with the real world.  Now everything isn’t real in some entire pictures.  So in part, film is dead simply because it has been erased from the production process.  Sure, you can capture two actors walking down a greenscreen “hallway” in 6k with film, but what’s the point?  Who cares if two elements of the shot are at a better, more rich, resolution if the rest of the scene is fake?

That said, contemporary features that don’t involve a lot of special effects DO benefit from the richness of film.  These are the films that generally end up winning the academy awards.  But once again, the storytellers of yesteryear are fading, and there’s really nobody to replace them.

With regards to film: It is expensive. You can shoot multiple projects with thousands of hours of footage on a RED (or C300, or, or, or…), and your total cost will still not touch the cost of just film on a single large Hollywood production.

As for resolution not mattering, I agree but that’s also not really what you wrote either.

First of all, it’s been generally accepted that 35mm film has, in pristine condition, about 4K worth of resolvable resolution, roughly translated to a digital format of the same resolution. However, all these years people have been viewing such films in the theater, projected after they have undergone significant layers of generational loss. Then projectors themselves added in further reductions. The statement that for 100 years we have been able to “screen in 4K” is simply untue and by a large margin.
For mechanical projection, SMPTE allows flutter and weave up to 0.2%, which often reduces projected resolution down to 1K. Well maintained mechanical projectors however can operate at 0.05%, which can almost reach 2K resolution. (see “An Introduction to Aliasing and Sharpening in Digital Motion Picture Systems”, SMPTE, 2003, and http://www.etconsult.com/papers/Technical%20Issues%20in%20Cinema%20Resolution.pdf – a white paper that posits that most theatrical film presentations actually topped out around DVD resolution in perceived detail).
Now, on the surface it seems true that people can often get sharper, more pristine viewing quality at home on HD sets and projectors than anything they could have seen in a film based theater. This seems to make sense, and is also true of 2K projectors in large theaters, as at smaller screen sizes with multiple pictire heights of distance, there is also more perceived resolution. The bigger the screen, the more resolution you need, as we all know, and in the home, even with large screen sizes of 100+” off of HD projectors, you’re going to see (depending on how close you sit) in most cases more picture detail than with a 2K projection seen at very close distances in a large theater. If you’re right up on the front rows, 4K may help increase the resolution and make the pixels less noticable. If anything, home theaters can look sharper than most celluloid based projection.
However, all of that said, there’s a practical limit to resolution. Bringing 4K TVs into the home is utterly pointless, from a perceived detail to the human eye perspective. Due to limitations in the way the human eye perceives image detail, with a 4K screen one would have sit approximately 4 feet away (or closer) from a 60″ 4K TV to notice any resolution difference. For a 100″ projected screen, it’s closer than 5 feet, and to see -any- noticable improvement at all, it’s a more reasonable but still rather close 12 feet. (see http://carltonbale.com/does-4k-resolution-matter/). This begs the question however – how many people have 100″ screens in their homes? (I do, and I sit a pretty close 11 feet away!) For that matter, how many people have 60″ screens? A far more common size is 45-50″. At a typical seating distance of 10 feet for a living room containing a screen of that size, you don’t even need 1080P resolution; 720P looks the same to most people! So why on Earth will we need 4K, and how will that make a difference, especially to the average person? It won’t. It won’t make a difference to anyone without better than 20/20 vision. It’s a limitation of the human body, not of electronics. To think anything else is to be living a dream – which MAY become reality when we have wall-sized screens that are viewing content a few feet away, much like artwork or wallpaper. Until then, and that’s perhaps 20 years or more out? No one needs it, and even then I highly doubt anyone would take up their whole wall for a TV or movie presentation – they may only see a portion so the furnture doesn’t block the view. And when that happens, we’re right back at human eye limitations.
So I’m not sure what your point is about film or the need for delivering in 4k. Projected film in the vast majority of cased never even came close to 2K resolution, never mind 4K. Just like cameras and lenses, optics, mechnical issues, and generational loss were the demons there. This rush for 4K in the home is chasing after nothing but easy cash and credit card “prestiege”. And while 4K can have value in the theater for those in the first 3rd of the theater, for most of the room no one could ever see the difference or notice. 4K’s value really is in reframing, VFX, and archival purposes when and if that digital wallpaper becomes cheap. And then, no one will care about what you have made anyway, unless you’re the next Scorcese. And for those peope, their production companies will rent a higher resolution camera. In short – for distribution – 4K is and likely will forever be exciting to those selling gear and those who fawn over it- and that’s all. After all, the need for even 1080P is a stretch in many home settings.Going back to film for resolution alone is a losing proposition, even if theaters were projecting one-off copies for one night only. There are certainly advantages to film in dynamic range, analog color reproduction, and so on. But resolution is/was certainly not one of the practical benefits.
Regarding where people get their content: this may surprise you but people are still going out to theaters. Yes, it’s not as popular as it once was, but humans have the innate need to go to a destination in a social setting and share experiences. The live theatre isn’t going away, and neither is the movie theater. If a film like the Avengers (filmed in 2k, no less) can make over $100M in its first weekend, I wouldn’t say the film industry is hurting. Mutliple distribution avenues are making films more accessible to more people, and that is great. But the home theater didn’t kill the social theater. I have a 103″ HD theater in my home and I still go now and then. I like to be around people.Celluoid died because it was expensive for a product that had diminishing returns – simple. Digital affords distrubution that is unencumbered by the pitfalls of an analog medium. There is no generational loss, there is no mechnical issue that degrades image in most cases, and there is no consumable that’s like the cost of film. Digital has afforded filmmakers (a funny statement that we even say “film” at all) the ability to be more creative, and do faster. Fim studios can push out more product and see what sticks. Is this necessarily a good thing? That’s to be decided; if the quality of the work overall suffers as it seems to have, then perhaps the studios need to rehtink how they are allocating those increased savings in time and money. But it’s not the medium to blame, that’s for sure. When it succeeds and when it fails, it’s people to blame.
Someone once told me that the Dutch film “The Celebration” was a stunning work, and it had no fancy camera moves or film or even high definition. It was filmed on a SD camcorder. It won awards, and high praise. It’s not what the camera can do that makes a great “film”, it’s what the person makes with it that counts. People generally accept a certain quality standard (which in the past was, essentially 1-1.5k in a big theater), and after that they look at content. And frequently, if the content is significantly outstranding – story, lighting, action, direction and so on, they will care even less about the camera or resolution. Production value isn’t the equal of camera resolution or dynamic range. People are missing the point here. Cameras and resolution are only tools. Owning a better camera doesn’t make me a better story teller, it just makes it a little easier to focus on what matters. My C300 doesn’t win me praise – what I make with it does (or doesn’t). (And despite the 4K dreamers, it will look just great on that faux-IMAX screen down the street).
In closing, saying that shooting digitally necessarily makes people lazy is a crock. Lazy people make themselves lazy. Digital can help enable a lazy storyteller a bit, but so can anything else if people are given an easy way out without direction and consequence.  Making a better chip is easy, making people better is hard.
Bottom line – film projection didn’t bring us anything magical except for time and expense. There was no lost “100 years of 4K”. What we are perhaps losing is the ability to sit around a campfire and tell a compelling story. Until that issue is addressed, the technology doesn’t mean shit.