How would you like to host a first-run movie for all of your family and friends, right in the comfort of the awesome home theater that you carefully crafted just for moments like this? On the very day it was released in "real" theaters? Sounds pretty cool—right until you get to the price tag. A startup called Prima Cinema wants to offer this exact service to discerning movie-watchers for the low, low price of $20,500.

The $20,000 is a one-time fee to set up a "digital delivery system" in your home. After that, it's $500 per film that you want to host to as many or as few viewers as you'd like. Prima knows that the price is high—that's apparently the point, as it's aimed toward the "best-appointed living rooms," according to the Wall Street Journal. Despite existing within a "super-premium niche market," Prima believes it will be able to make its way into 250,000 homes in the next five years.

The service has not yet launched, but Prima hopes to have a number of major movie studios plus some independents on board by the time it goes public in late 2011. Universal Pictures will be one of them (as it's a stakeholder in Prima), but Viacom will apparently not. The studio says that it wants to continue keeping its theater distributors happy by not undercutting their business—a decision that's undoubtedly helped by Viacom's parent company owning its own theater chain.

Unsurprisingly, movie theaters aren't very keen on the idea of letting people access first-run films at home. "This proposal will give pirates a pristine digital copy early, resulting in millions [in] lost revenue to piracy, while at the same time selling a very limited number of units," National Association of Theatre Owners John Fithian told the WSJ. "Only billionaires can afford $500 per movie."

Well, we don't think it requires a billion dollars to pay $500 for a movie that you and your friends are excited about seeing, but it does take a big commitment to put down the $20,000 first. For comparison's sake, we checked into the costs of renting out a movie theater for a first-run movie. The rates depend highly on the location, which day, and what time of day, but generally for a Saturday night rental for a just-released movie, they tend to fall in the $400-600 per rental range. If you assume an average cost of $500, that means your baller friend can rent out a theater for 41 different movies for the same cost as hosting a single movie through Prima. (Not counting snacks and drinks either at the theater or at home, of course.)

The downsides to renting out a theater, of course, is that it's not in your home. The list of upsides, though, seems to win out: (probably) a significantly larger seating area, your pick of any movie (Viacom included), and most importantly, no preparation work or cleanup. To be fair, some films/theaters will cost more to rent out: the Kerasotes theater chain in Chicago told Ars that their smallest 140-person theater would cost around $1700 to rent out during a non-matinee time. Still, a dedicated person could do that 12 times for the same cost of one movie through Prima.

Movie studios have been experimenting with new ways to make money with the DVD market dying a slow and painful death. Some have moved their digital releases to before the DVD release, while others are releasing their movies on-demand at the same time as DVD. Simultaneous box office and home releases have heretofore remained a distant dream, though, so even though Prima's services may not be accessible to the masses, it's a first step.