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Sixteen years and an Oscar or two after his celebrated Sex, Lies and Videotape, acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh comes out with Bubble on January 27, an experimental 73 minute thriller about a murderous love triangle set in a doll factory starring a cast of non actors recruited from the actual town where the movie was filmed.

But while they’re interesting, Soderbergh’s cinematic experiments per se aren’t exactly news. He has been fiddling with the very concepts of filmmaking for years – the critically panned Kafka, the bizarre Schizopolis, the interesting Gray’s Anatomy (incidentally, watch out for the Soderbergh/Gray Spalding documentary announced for 2007) and the more recent Solaris and the television series K Street as well as the pilot for Unscripted on HBO.

Yet Bubble has been garnering a lot of headlines lately and that is because of Soderbergh’s plan to release the movie simultaneously in the theatres, on cable and on DVD.

Predictably, cinema exhibitors aren’t happy – the movie business has been going through a slump lately and Soderbergh’s plan, which he foresees as a model for the future, could end up hitting an already sore spot. It is well known that the average movie, even if it turns a good profit, still attracts only a fraction of the audiences that television commands. If a movie could attract the numbers of say, the latest season of American Idol with its 33 million viewers in the USA, it would be a monster hit. Just to keep things in perspective, the Lord of the Rings movies averaged more than 260 million dollars at the box office per movie in the United States. Going by the average $9 price of a movie ticket that means roughly 29 million people made the trip to the multiplex. And this is keeping in mind that most movies are considered lucky if they can cross the 100 million mark at the domestic box office.

With odds like these, the theatres don’t really need a director, that too one who’s that rarest of the rare, a critical and popular success, releasing his movies on DVD before his movie has had a chance to complete a run at the local Cineplex. And adding their voice to the chorus against Soderbergh’s initiative are many Hollywood insiders such as M.Night Shyamalan, the director of the Sixth Sense.

In an interview to The Hollywood Reporter, Shyamalan said, “I’m going to stop making movies if they end the cinema experience. If there’s a last film that’s released only theatrically, it’ll have my name on it. This is life or death to me.” Later, speaking at an exhibitor’s convention, he asked them to boycott the movies of those like Soderbergh who advocate simultaneous or day-and-date releases. “At the end of the day they hold all the cards,” he said of the exhibitors.

Noah Baumbach who directed 2005’s critically acclaimed The Squid and the Whale isn’t a fan either but apparently he doesn’t believe it’s a “heartless and soulless” attempt a la Shyamalan. “I don’t like that. I think movies should be seen in the theatre. But at the same time I think there are probably certain kinds of movies that that might work for,” he said, speaking to the BBC’s Talking Movies. In this he echoes Soderbergh who says that day-and-date releases could make art house cinema more accessible to people who don’t usually get a chance to see a limited release movie like Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale because they don’t live near the kind of theatre that would play it.

In an interview to the same episode of Talking Movies, Soderbergh points out other effects of his initiative. “One of the arguments that I’ve been making is: you show me one big name title in the last five years, and they were out on DVD the day they opened. I’ve seen them, some of my own [movies]. This is about trying to get control over some of that,” he says. “Piracy is a huge, huge business. The impact on piracy outstrips the potential impact of people having stuff on DVD at the same time as it’s in the theatre. The money we’re losing to piracy is astronomical, billions and billions of dollars.”

Todd Wagner, an executive producer on Bubble, agrees. “I would contend that it’s the segment of the population that’s not going to the movies that we are reaching with this programme. The people who’re going to the movies will continue to go to the movies.”

While day-and-date releases aren’t exactly going to become the industry standard overnight, it could well be something that has far reaching repercussions. Bollywood, for example, might want to look into it.

According to the private financial institution, Yes Bank, the world’s largest film industry grossed between $235 - $320 million in ticket sales last year. While satellite rights and home video sales add to the tally, it doesn’t take reigning superstar Shahrukh Khan to point out that this is but a fraction of the kind of monetary power that Hollywood wields even though Bollywood enjoys a wider audience along with its higher output. While this was a bumper year for Bollywood, in an interview to the BBC Khan says that the largest Bollywood release boasted merely 700-odd theatrical prints whereas the average Hollywood movie puts out about 1500.

And if piracy costs Hollywood billions of dollars each year, then Bollywood too has lost millions. Early last year, according to the BBC, Dutch police discovered a massive piracy ring operating out of Rotterdam, specializing in Hindi movies pirated in Pakistan. This came just a short while after a British court handed down a three year sentence to Jay Buhecha, whose piracy ring netted more than UK£26,000 a month at its peak.

Celebrated Bollywood eccentric Dev Anand weighed in recently when he said, “The way piracy is destroying the industry is alarming as in the next two years, half of the cinemas in the country are likely to be closed due to losses.” Indeed, the industry perceives the threat to be grave enough for them to take matters into their own hands: “We have launched a movement and have decided to form our own anti-piracy squads as the government has said that it does not have a force to fight piracy,” said film maker Yash Chopra in a speech to the entertainment committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

In such a scenario, if Bollywood were to take a leaf out of Soderbergh’s simultaneous release idea, it is hard to see how it will adversely affect its fortunes at the box office. India is no stranger to the piracy market – what is available in Pakistan or in Europe is also available in the bazaars and local video parlors of India. Selling quality merchandise to those who would otherwise contribute contraband to the black market could well be a way to halt piracy in its tracks.

It would also make sense in the larger context as it makes it more convenient for the growing diaspora and international Bollywood aficionados living without easy access to theatres that play Indian movies to see the movies that they love. As Bollywood already releases some DVDs early in certain markets (thus making the job of pirates that much easier) this would be a natural path to take.

Of course, that famous Hollywood distribution network that Shahrukh Khan envies so much is still at play. Soderbergh’s Bubble is set to be released through the Todd Wagner and Dallas Mavericks (an American basketball team) owner Mark Cuban co-owned television channels (HDNet and HDNet Movies), Landmark Theatres, Magnolia Pictures and Magnolia Home Entertainment. Bubble, which cost a princely $1.6 million was made in conjunction with the duo’s production companies 2929 Productions and HDNet Films and is the first of six such movies Soderbergh plans to make.

As Reese Witherspoon told the BBC, “I think things change, you have to be very aware of change and roll with it instead of fight it.” It’s the way the world spins.