Coming to a small screen near you ... Steve Jobs outlines his plans. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/ Getty
If Steve Jobs gets his way, the phrase "big screen" may soon rival "high concept" as cinema's most misleading expression. The Apple chief executive yesterday outlined plans to move into full-length movie downloads for iPods to an audience of eager techies in San Francisco.
The service is starting off in a modest enough way, with just 75 films on offer. Regular new offerings are promised, though at the moment - thanks to Mr Jobs' other job as a company director there - it's just the Disney studios supplying new releases.
Both Apple and Hollywood could use a boost, with sales of iPods and DVDs flattening out, but iPod cinema seems rather an outside bet. Who, really, wants to watch a film on a screen the size of a matchbox? It sounds to me like a frankly unpleasant experience, but then I'm growing old and Luddite.
And looking around at young folks, they do seem to be spending an awful lot of their time squinting at titchy screens of one sort or another, whether on phones or game consoles or indeed their iPods, as they scroll through their unnecessarily vast libraries of MP3s. So perhaps the world is ready - in a way that it wasn't when pocket TVs like Sony's "Watchman" came on the market - for miniature movies.
If it does catch on, presumably there'll be a knock-on reduction in the scale of "big screen" productions. There's not much point in filming a scene with thousands of extras if such epic details are going to shrink to pixel dimensions.
Other genres face similar challenges: you're going to struggle to make a thumbnail-sized King Kong or Hulk look anything other than cute. And if vulgar thrills and spills are going to lose much of their power, so is classy cinematography. And forget about arthouse fare with subtitles.
There is a small upside to this kind of future: it might just cure the studios of their attachment to supposedly spectacular explosions - which are exactly the same in every movie - if viewers can build bigger blazes by lighting matches. And while it's obviously hopeful news for Tom Cruise at a difficult time, the rest of us should probably be a little alarmed - shouldn't we?
