The Genesis is a digital camera that pretends to be a film camera, just like Avid is a NLE that pretends to be a film cutter.
Genesis filmography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(camera)#Filmography
RED filmography: http://www.imdb.com/company/co0203252/
People don't pay just for the technology at Panavision though, they pay for service and lenses. True you can buy a 10k camera, but as soon as it breaks, production stops and you are losing money trying to find a new camera. Your PV camera goes down and I can guarantee they have a new camera on set or a technician fixing it very soon. You probably even have a backup on set for free. Generally though, PV cameras just work, and I didn't see a digital cinema camera that was as easy to use and similar to a film camera as the Genesis until Arri's Alexa came out last year.
PVs lenses are also spectacular and you generally can't rent them without renting a PV camera. Most cinematographers that wan't the PV look will use any camera, just as long as they are using the PV lenses.
In fact, Peter Jackson IS one of the main supporters of RED, making the first videos and shorts with it.
Peter Jackson will also care about having to move to strange places to rent a camera and return it, and not being able to broke it in the field if he wants.
Peter Jackson probably doesn't care about the difference in price, but there are a number of student and indie directors/producers who certainly feel the difference between $4k/day and $400/day.
http://tvnz.co.nz/business-news/20m-rebate-hobbit-in-first-y...
Can we see if we can get a deal on the camera rental?
And $4000 a day can add up pretty quick. 50 days is approximately the average number of days for filming. That's $200,000 per camera. Since you frequently want to do shoot from a few angles, you're talking a half million or more just for cameras.
Now, for a normal Hollywood blockbuster, at $50M, that's significant but not too bad. For an independent film, which will likely have a budget under $10M, and sometimes even under $1M, that's a pretty substantial portion of your costs.
So cameras that cost $10K to buy outright will make a big difference in this space. All of a sudden, things that were prohibitively expensive to independent filmmakers are within reach. Independent films allow people to have more artistic creativity given that there's less at stake; they can also be the "long tail" of filmmaking, covering more niche interests than a big blockbuster is going to have to. So this could be a fairly significant disruptive innovation, if these turn out to be worth it.
Of course, it's not quite as good a deal as it might seem at first, since I believe the price quoted is just for the very core of the camera, containing the sensor, and not lenses, which are where some of the real cost is. But still, these will allow people to do 4K filming who never have been able to do so before.
You don't want the film company to actually own anything because then the people owed money might have something to go after