The DCP (Digital Cinema Package) is the standard for projected digital cinema, a collection of media files with specifications set by the Digital Cinema Initiatives, a joint venture between Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Bros. Studios. Delivered to a theater via hard drive, the equipment to project these files often costs upwards of $75,000, a burden far too heavy for many small theaters.

Marty Rubin, associate director of programming at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, doesn't think the visual aspects of a DCP measures up to a 35mm print, giving the example of a recent screening of Tommy as lacking in sharpness and detail. Others say the flat digital image can't match the robustness of celluloid. "There is a special quality to the experience of seeing a film in 35mm," Rubin says. "It has an impact. People may not even be consciously aware of it, but when you start giving them someone else, they might have less and less of that special feeling when they do see a movie at the theater and start drifting away."

Julia Marchese, an employee at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, created a "Fight for 35mm" petition, which is currently close to its goal of 10,000 signatures.

"For revival houses, the threat is less imminent [than for first-run theaters], but more severe," she says. "Most independent theaters are struggling to remain open as it is, and this may be the final blow which kills them off forever."

Theaters that can't afford the DCI-compliant equipment may eventually go out of business, or survive on the limited amount of prints available to them; even without the studios, there are still archives and private collectors that own prints and are open to working with smaller theaters. The theaters that can afford the equipment will tip-toe their way in to the digital world. The attitude, maybe because there is no choice, is that film and digital will exist side by side, and there is not much we can do about it. Digital will be the norm, and film will become a precious object.

But studios say that the move away from 35mm not only makes financial and technical sense, but that there's a demand for digital—and that quality is part of the reason why.

"The fact of the matter is, we get just as many requests at the studio for our library of restored films from theaters to show them digitally as we do for new prints," says Grover Crisp, executive vice president at Sony Pictures. "We've tried to accommodate both aspects of this, and for many of our restored titles we record out to a new negative that has the entire cleanup that the digital does, and we make a few select prints. Those are for the venues that can show film, and then we have the DCP for the venues that can show digital."

"There is a tradeoff, however," Crisp continued. "The manufacturing process of the prints is a degrading process. Even if you have a brand-new digitally restored negative that you make a print from—it will look very good, probably be the best looking print you've ever made—it still won't look as good as the digital in terms of sharpness and detail, because you're not going through that photo mechanical process of making a print."