Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Joss Whedon may be the 21st century’s answer to Walt Disney. "Uncle Walt" was the maverick mogul who led Hollywood into adopting three of its most important technological innovations of the last century: he made one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, Steamboat Willie, in the 1920s; left black-and-white cartoons behind to dive headfirst into Technicolor production in the early 1930s; and in the 1950s realized that television could expand his studio’s business, rather than simply posing a threat to movie ticket sales.

Joss Whedon, the producer/director who created the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, doesn’t have Walt’s sterling innovation track record just yet. But with a new Internet video series he launched in July, he’s demonstrating that he has Walt’s willingness to explore new technologies and new business models.

That’s a rare trait in Hollywood, an industry that, since its inception, has usually opted to defend the status quo whenever a new technology or business model emerges. Directors, stars, and studio executives have always been quick to come up with a litany of reasons why sound, color, home video, computer-powered editing, and digital cinematography weren’t worth pursuing.

Today the issue is, of course, digital media. A similar seismic shift is happening, as viewers’ time and attention is gravitating away from the silver screen and towards the Web, iPods, and mobile phones. (The research firm comScore said in May that 73 percent of U.S. Internet users are now viewing video online, and within that group, the average person is watching nearly four hours each month.)

But established entertainment companies have been slow to make their vast libraries of movies and TV shows available on these new platforms. Amazingly, you can’t buy or rent classic movies like Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, Annie Hall, or Titanic from iTunes or Movielink, two of the leading online marketplaces for movies and TV shows.

Media companies been even slower to experiment with producing original content geared to digital platforms. Why? Because such content would require real change. It must be produced at much lower budgets. It ought to involve the audience in new ways, and encourage viral sharing. It should take advantage of new viewing behaviors — a three-minute window during a subway ride, for instance, rather than a two-hour commitment on a Saturday night.

So, instead of developing digital content that connects with audiences in new ways, Hollywood’s reaction has been to revert to its preservationist tendencies. The movie industry (like every big and successful business) has a deep motivation to preserve what has made it successful in the past, keeping existing business models intact and maintaining individuals’ status in the entertainment ecosystem. What glamour is there for a director in creating a three-minute movie intended for mobile phones, compared with a $100 million epic that will premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater?

That’s what makes Joss Whedon’s experiment earlier this month so interesting. He isn’t the first to try to produce high-quality original content for the Web. (Coincidentally, ex-Disney chief executive Michael Eisner has also been funding experiments in online video.) Rather, with Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, he’s playing with a totally new creative form — a humorous musical about superheroes, told in fifteen-minute installments. Whedon made three installments — half of a full-length feature film or made-for-TV movie — for a budget in the low six figures. And he’s eschewing traditional TV or theatrical distribution entirely.

Instead, Whedon made the series available for free online but for just one week. Whedon’s fans flocked to the Dr. Horrible site in such hordes that it crashed temporarily, not unlike the way people lined up around the block to see The Jazz Singer in 1927. Now, the series is available on iTunes for $1.99 an episode, or on Hulu.com, with ads interspersed. A DVD with bonus features comes next. (One of the features will be a musical commentary track by the creators, a totally inspired idea.)

It’s the sort of experimentation Walt Disney was famous for in his lifetime and the sort of experimentation Hollywood needs to do more of, if the industry hopes to maintain its connection with an audience faced with a growing number of other entertainment options.

Scott Kirsner writes the weekly "Innovation Economy" in the Boston Globe, covers tech issues for Variety, edits the blog CinemaTech, and is the author of "Inventing the Movies" and "The Future of Web Video." He’s also one of the founders of a new gathering to be held this fall in the San Francisco Bay Area, "The Conversation: The Future of Cinema, Games, and Online Video."