Thieves later, films now.

Or: not film. This is just something that I've started noticing, and it's hard to ignore. There's a lot of fuss at the moment about computer games eating into the profits of the film industry — just the same fuss, as MovieBob has pointed out in his Studio System set of articles, as there was when TV really got going, for example (1). I kind of heard this from various quarters and didn't pay much attention to it, to be honest. However, recently I've heard ads for some new war film on the radio that turned out to be for, I think, Battlefield 3, and if you travel the tube in London you can't exactly miss that many of the extra large poster spots, that would previously have been taken up by films — even quite obscure films — are now publicising games — and not just one big hit game, but at least four or five different ones. Just now I kicked off an article on the Escapist to be rewarded by a trailer that had me demanding, "Holy crap, did I miss a new fantasy film that's coming out? What on earth is this?" because it was obviously too Nordic to be Immortals or the Clash of the Titans sequel (2). The film? Skyrim, of course.

(1) In fact, historically Hollywood's reaction to an encroaching other medium has been "3D!" and we're currently in the middle of the third rollout of that particular technology.

(2) And, to be fair, I was also saying, WTF horned helmet, because there is no way that any sane man would be seen wearing that.