Ray Winstone, at 50, is not an obvious choice to make it as Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon slayer of Grendel, but never mind - computers can help. Britain’s answer to Robert De Niro can be 17 again, with the help of digital technology, and become an all-conquering hero.

And so what was intended to be a low-cost film has become, in the hands of director Robert Zemeckis of Forrest Gump fame, a big-budget production costing somewhere around $150 million, (£73 million), which is a lot of money in anybody’s book. Another option might have been to find younger actors but this is 2007 and, in the era of Sin City, reality is not enough.

Now, it is hard to be sure that Beowulf represents the high water mark for Hollywood, although nobody thought that Britney Spears would represent the high water mark in 1999, music’s best-ever year, but there are some straws in the wind to suggest that the movie business could get tougher in years ahead.

The cost of film-making has increased by an estimated 16 per cent to $9.7 billion between 2004 and 2006, an increase fuelled by the escalating costs of special effects, talent and all the other side deals involved.

Alone of all the majors, Disney discloses in its annual filing to the SEC its “participations and residuals” – that’s accounting-speak for the money paid out of gross revenues to those who can demand it. In 2002, Disney paid out $154 million, rising to $554 million in 2006; surely that can’t have all gone to Keira Knightley in various instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Rising costs would be bearable if the DVD business was in good shape but after years of growth, sales have turned down in both 2005 and 2006, by 11.3 per cent, to an estimated $11.1 billion. The recovery in the US box office in 2006 after a weak 2005 is not enough to compensate for this; and film, just like every other form of media and entertainment, has to battle with Facebook, violent computer games and, of course, television.

In Britain, films once formed the heart of BBC and ITV schedules – and more recently Five, but overexposure earlier in the cycle means that movies rate weakly on free-to-air television, with the result that broadcasters make their own, better, programmes to compensate.

That trend has already seen free television revenues decline in the US, and it will spread elsewhere. Free TV income has barely grown globally in the past two years – up 2.4 per cent to $1.7 billion – and while pay television is doing better, its 10.8 per cent improvement to $3.5 billion is still not matching the rate of cost increases.

There is more. At some point, piracy is going to become a problem. At present, file sizes are too large, security is better, BitTorrent is too hard for ordinary people to use. Yet there is no reason why film should be insulated from the crisis that afflicted the music business. It’s simply a question of technology and there are signs that some manufacturers are taking action that may ultimately help the process along.

This week Sony signed an agreement with DivX, which produces software that makes it easy to produce videos on home computers as well as DVD and Blu-ray discs. This could quickly be taken up by pirates as well as legitimate home movie makers.

Add all this up, as has Roger Smith of Global Media Intelligence, whose research is the basis for the figures quoted, and the conclusion is that Hollywood’s 130 most important movies lost $1.9 billion collectively during 2006, the year of Night at the Museum and The Da Vinci Code.

Estimates can be wrong, of course, but the fundamental trends are apparent: Hollywood is finding it tougher to export films because consumers want local content; DVD sales have reached a peak; special effects are drifting into every movie, and Angelina Jolie is almost certainly paid too much.

There is no reason why the film business is ultimately immune to all the trends that have put other forms of media and entertainment under pressure; slaying Grendel may turn out to be a rather more straightforward exercise, even for Ray Winstone.

— Is it me, or are you bored with Facebook too? Set up a page, find a few friends – well, as many as you can muster – pick the odd application and well, then what? Reading a feed about people who have downloaded the Optical Illusion Challenges application, or deleted it, is not really what one calls information you needed to know. And you learn far too much about the friends who, well, may not have been friends at all.

Now this is not to say that Facebook doesn’t have its uses - one is allowing 150,000 people to announce plans to boycott BP on November 19, some of whom may even be motorists.

But it also has its limits. Fans will make time for Facebook in their lives and doubtless the explosive growth in user numbers will continue for a year or so. Yet with all three social networks – the others being MySpace (that’s owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times) and Bebo – running at about 10 million to 11 million UK users a month each, it would be reasonable to assume the rapid phase of growth is already over.

Current estimates say that people spend on average just under five and half hours a month on all their social networking sites and that is a decent amount of time. However, don’t forget that the typical Daily Mirror reader spends 39 minutes with the tabloid a day, or nearly 16 hours a month (taking Sundays off). Then there’s television. On average, people watch 108 hours a month, or just over 3½ hours a day.

All this suggests that, while social networking has squeezed its way into people’s lives, for many that may amount to little more than a toehold. Even social networking has to fight against other media for time and attention, however trendy it is.

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