an interesting article from slate on how hollywood movies really make their money. turns out that the theater box office contributes less than 20% of the money made on movies. dvd is where it is at, and with dvd sales up it isn’t always the movies that did best at the box-office that sell the most dvds. but no, this doesn’t mean that smaller movies have a more democratic shot at a second life:
For merchandisers like Wal-Mart, DVDs are a means to lure consumers, who may buy other products, into the store. The box-office numbers are of little relevance (especially since it’s teenagers who create huge opening weekends, and they cannot afford to buy more profitable goods like plasma TVs). Instead of box-office results, merchandisers look for movies with stars such as Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, who have traction with their highly desired older customers.
i guess the fact that it took “after hours” so long to come to dvd means that scorcese’s audience doesn’t buy plasma tv’s either.
No idea how long this link will work, but it seems relevant. The movie indutry is suffering from some very rapidly changing consumer habits, similar to what torpedoed the music indutry.
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Summer’s Flops Spur Movie Studios To Reassess TV Ads
As a long and disappointing summer movie season comes to an end, Hollywood marketers are realizing that network-television advertising, long the lifeblood of their movie campaigns, may not pack the punch it once did.
Network TV has been part of Hollywood’s sales formula for many years, as studios desperate to launch expensive blockbusters blitzed the national airwaves in an effort to reach the broadest possible audience. But many studio executives now are calling that formula into question, having watched this summer as it failed to pay off amid a string of box-office laggards.
The diminishing effectiveness of such ads is to some symptomatic of a broader problem in Hollywood. Audiences have caught on to the studios’ tactics for making an “event” out of every new movie and so can’t be counted on to turn out in droves just because they were confronted with a hail of come-ons during Thursday night prime time.
“In their quest for bigger and bigger opening weekends, studios have so overmarketed their movies during the past few years that they’ve left audiences weary,” says Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of General Electric Co.’s Universal Pictures. “By the time some blockbusters open, moviegoers aren’t feeling excitement — they’re just feeling exhausted.”
That certainly was the indication from audiences who stayed away from heavily marketed summer movies such as “Stealth,” from Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures Entertainment, and “The Island,” a joint venture of DreamWorks SKG and Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. — two action flicks each of which cost roughly $150 million to make and market and likely will be outgunned in U.S. ticket sales by the tiny nature film “March of the Penguins.”
For many of the big studios, this summer brought unsettling results, as directors with solid track records failed to deliver and previously reliable popcorn fare proved no draw. Some “big” movies got bad reviews and worse word-of-mouth. Weekend box-office revenue sagged significantly below its levels of just a year ago for most of the season, lifted only by well-loved directors such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg — whose respective “Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” and “War of the Worlds” made mints — and such sleeper hits as the R-rated comedy “Wedding Crashers.”
Against this backdrop, it is small wonder that studio marketers are looking for new ways to fill theater seats. For some, this first entails making films — and then creating ads — calculated to appeal to the largest possible audience.
Consumers between the ages of 12 and 34, who are at the heart of the moviegoing public, “spend more time on the Internet, playing videogames, on their cellphones” than going to movies, says Tim Spengler, executive vice president and director of national broadcast for Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Initiative, an ad-placement firm. “As a result, marketers are slightly altering their mix to better target the heavy moviegoing young audience,” he says.
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LA Weekly’s cover feature this week was four articles about Movies: specifically unseen ones: “Movies you can’t see – and why you can’t see them.” Four stories that would probably be of interest to some people here.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/40/features-foundas.php
The links to the other three stories are in a handy yellow box on the right as you scroll down the article a bit.
I think that what a lot of these articles (and the ones mentioned above) are getting to is that the movie industry is in as much – and the same kind of – trouble as the music industry was/is: Big differences in the way the public wants to access the media being prodced, and how much they’re willing to pay for it.
This was fun to read and the websites are excellent discoveries. Has anyone seen Chantal Ackerman;s Jeanne Dielman? It’s one of those films you keep running into in history books and gender criticism, etc. And I’ve always wanted to see it. Now I can get a bootleg copy for $23. At three and a half hours I’m almost positive I will never actually work my way through it all, but there is a part of me who still wants the opportunity to stop watching. Anybody know anything about this film?
Another interesting article on Slate about major stars appearing in indie movies – and what goes into those decisions. This topic has fascinated me for a while: Stars like Clooney are actually spending their “political captial” to make movies like his Edward Murrow picture, but also to appear in virtually unseen fims, such as Solaris.
http://www.slate.com/id/2126120/?nav=tap3
Nothing illuminating here other than some nuts and bolts details on how the deals come across, which I found interesting.