With the arrival of the internet, it wasn't long before some smart-pantys put their brain to work and found a way to move video piracy online, and nowadays it's possible to find copies of pretty much any movie you can think of online - be it through legal or illegal means - including movies that haven't even come out in your local cinema yet. That, coupled with Video On Demand, Netflix, movies on iTunes and countless other sites without similar streaming and downloading capabilities should've spelt the end for cinema as we know it.

To an extent, that has proved to be true, as cinemas all over the country were shutting down over the last few years, and despite the advent of 3D and IMAX, while the actual numbers in the profit margins look bigger, the number of tickets being sold are way down. It would appear that the internet killed the cinema store (sorry, that song paraphrase sounded better in our heads).

But as any movie fan lately will tell you, it's not uncommon to see something like this on the internet lately:

That top image was taken by X-Men: Days Of Future Past director Bryan Singer and placed on his Twitter feed and was promptly retweeted and forwarded all around the world, as well as picked up by countless online entertainment news websites and had entire articles written about it. It's a picture of two empty wheelchairs in what looks like an empty office, but it was viewed hundreds of thousands of times within hours. If you check out Bryan Singer's Twitter feed lately, it is inundated with on-set pics of the upcoming mutant saga: a shot of the back of Hugh Jackman's head, a shot of Halle Berry in her Storm costume, a shot of Jennifer Lawrence getting painted blue, a shot of a Trask Industries poster. Nothing too revealing (except, possibly, in Lawrence's case, as she's in the nip), but all viewed and combed through and gossiped over for information.

And it all cost nothing. Absolutely nothing! Social media has dramatically cut into the costs of promotion for movies nowadays, in an age where promotion and costs are everything. A regular blockbuster can expect to double up on its production budget with promotional costs, as in a movie which cost $200 million to make will probably spend ANOTHER $200 million to promote. That is the cost of entry for the blockbuster game lately, but with social media doing a lot of the early leg-work for free, this should see costs coming way down for blockbuster producers.

It's not just Bryan Singer who's doing it, either. Gareth Edwards has been doing similar things for his upcoming Godzilla reboot, Peter Jackson has been doing webisodes on-set for The Hobbit Trilogy, Vin Diesel has been teasing images of Riddick for almost a year now. Everyone's at it, and it's all over the web for free. Actually, speaking of Vin Diesel…

Diesel took that photo and put it on his Facebook page recently, letting us know that the picture was taken inside Marvel Studios, having just had a meeting with Marvel head-honchos about possibly being cast in the Marvel Universe. And the internet went WILD!

Diesel has been on a resurgence lately after the Fast & Furious franchise revved up and revived itself, and with early word on Riddick being overwhelmingly positive, now is the time for film-makers to cash in on his popularity. Marvel appear to be doing just that, but unlike previous casting sessions, when we knew the character but didn't know who would be playing them, this time we know the actor, but we have no idea who he might be playing. Rumour mills started almost immediately - will he be playing Thanos in The Avengers: Age Of Ultron or Guardians Of The Galaxy? Will he be Giant Man in the upcoming Ant-Man movie? - and this was all just more free publicity for Marvel, or perhaps even more importantly, Vin Diesel himself. A self-perpetuating gossip mill, Diesel has tapped into the full power of the social media to big up his own celebrity status. It's actually a stroke of genius, as his rapidly filling up IMDb profile is proof of.

And finally, there's this:

Gone are the days when a studio executive might say "Oh, we've got a dud here. I'll tell you what, let's just release it without any press screenings, and by the time audiences have seen it over the opening weekend, it'll be too late for them to inform anyone how bad it is, and we'll have already made our money back! Hooray!" Today's audiences are far too wily for that; they know that if a new movie is opening on Friday and there's still no reviews for it by the Tuesday or the Wednesday, that it's most likely awful and will swerve to avoid. But even if they've absent-mindedly walked into a bad movie without researching it first, the second it's over they can take to Twitter to express their opinion; one quick search later and you'll find all of the positive and/or negative reviews for the movie you could want.

The internet has marginalised the amount of time it takes for the world to clue into the fact that a movie is a stinker to the amount of time it takes for that movie to play from beginning to end. Any kind of advance screening or premiere will lead to a flurry of tweets and Facebook updates, which will then get shared and retweeted and then the whole world will know. Potentially this will lead film-makers to simply ditch the thought process of "Yes, this film is crap, but it was cheap and people will go see any lowest common denominator", but this is in a perfect world were the average cinema goers will stop going to see the crap, cheap, lowest common denominator type movies.

This is a two-way street; internet initially crippled cinema, and is now potentially helping it get back on its feet again. But if we want it to stop feeding us garbage, we've got to stop consuming the garbage in the first place.