PRODUCTS SIMILAR BUT INFERIOR TO THE MULTIFILM

A product that could be considered similar to MULTIFILM, while actually being very different in its concept, is the so called “interactive movie”; a movie that changes the plot based on the viewer’s choices. 
One of the most recent and more successful is the one produced by Netflix, titled “Bandersnatch”. 

There are several limits in this product that the MULTIFILM overcomes: 

The viewer is placed in the uneasy position to be forced to make poor decisions that often he/she does not feel to take and almost always without having the right means to choose. For example, when the question is “should the protagonist go right or left?”, “should he/she do this or that?”, “should he/she eat the cereals X or Y?”, these dilemmas create an immediate frustration in the viewer’s mind, who, in choosing one of the two alternatives, will have the immediate desire to see the other too, but will be forced to repress it, having the possibility to see just one at a time. Otherwise, if one version after the other is showed randomly (without asking for anything or anticipating alternatives), no frustration is generated. 

Moreover the questions are often not very significant: why would the viewer prefer the right path over the left if anything about them is unknown? It is evident that this is not a real decision, because without knowing what it means to take different paths, one choice is the other and the question itself loses its meaning. 

Also there is a basic fact, that is: not every user wants to take an active part into an audiovisual show, simply because it is tiring. 

People who want to have an active part, usually, address the gaming market, that allows a wider participation in spite of just choosing “left or right” (for example playable movies like “Heavy Rain”, on Playstation); however this preference affects far fewer people. In fact the gaming market, however highly developed, is critically smaller than the audiovisual market. This because there are many more people that do not want to take any decision while watching an audiovisual work, but just to identify into the plot, to get excited following the unfolding of the story and to be entertained without continuous interruptions that break the tension and that imply a reasoning effort to allow the filmic experience to carry on. 

Moreover if the viewer has to be the one who has to choose the change in a movie it is obvious that this will be always and only be limited to the subject (the story of the movie) and not to other components of the movie itself, for example the screenplay, acting, editing, soundtrack. One can in fact ask the viewer what action the protagonist has to perform rather than another, but one cannot ask which words to choose, which thoughts to have, how to act, which editing version the viewer prefers to watch, what the soundtrack should be etc. All these variations can easily exist but their selection must be left to random (with a special software). 

Lastly it is obvious that a normal interactive movie wouldn’t generate any productive optimization being simply a traditional movie with different (and usually few) narrative developments, in which some location can be used a number of times, but in the end, all the scenes are always proposed in just one way. 

The key to the extraordinary productive advantage offered by the MULTIFILM lays in the fact that producing so many variations of the same scene does not cost as much as producing so many different scenes, but entertains the same amount of time (or even more if there is no immediate showing of the full version of the same scenes) 

If we think about the success that recently a product poorly innovative and very limited like Bandersnatch (produced by Netflix) had, one can realize what great hunger of innovation the worldwide market needs and so we understand what extraordinary success could a real revolutionary product like the MULTIFILM have.

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