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Topic: Too many Trailers article from the St. Paul paper
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 12-19-2003 06:50 PM
The local Register-Guard newspaper ran several articles about pre-show movie clutter in the entertainment section today. Moderators, do whatever you think you need to do if this is too much. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Previews of Coming Distractions
December 19, 2003
Some previews of coming distractions
By Lewis Taylor
The Register-Guard
At Cinemark 17, a screening of "Master and Commander" kicks off with a 21-minute mix of trailers, ads and public service announcements. Across the city at [Regal] Cinema World 8, the same film begins with 23 minutes of pre-feature promos.
Coke commercials, Estee Lauder ads, anti-drug spots and video game teasers have become as much a part of the multiplex experience as the coming attractions. And while industry experts say viewers can expect to see even more ads coming soon to a theater near them, some moviegoers already have had enough.
"The previews are fairly entertaining," says Martin Campbell, 40, of Eugene. "But personally, I don't like to pay money to watch commercials."
Campbell's sentiments are being echoed by film fans in other parts of the country. A number of different consumer advocacy groups have popped up, including the Portland-based Captive Motion Picture Audience of America, which protests "TV-like advertising" in the cinema and encourages viewers to write or call national theater chains to complain.
Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Los Angeles box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations, says in general, audiences enjoy the trailers; it's the commercials they can do without. Even so, he says, viewer discontent is not strong enough to make the ads go away.
"What are you going to do?" Dergarabedian wonders. "You can complain to the manager I suppose, but are you really not going to see 'Lord of the Rings' because they might show a Grand Am commercial before the movie?
"It's just the economics of the business, and it's manifested itself in this way."
Edward Hahn, 61, of Monroe isn't ready to embrace the ads, at least not so many of them. He says the movie theater is looking more and more like the satellite TV system he has at home. In other words, cluttered with commercials.
"I didn't' mind it when they used to just have a Coca-Cola (ad) at the beginning or an XM Radio (ad), Hahn said. "But now they're kind of overdoing it."
The European way
Along with a handful of previews, moviegoers in Eugene and Springfield can now expect a pair of public service announcements, a couple of Coca-Cola ads and half a dozen other plugs for everything from video games to all-over body spray.
"With television you can understand it because it's free," says Tom Canning, 67, of Vancouver, B.C. "You pay enough money to go to the movies without having to sit and watch that."
Terrell Falk, a spokeswoman for Cinemark, says the practice of packaging ads with movie trailers has been going on for decades in Europe. In the past, she says, American audiences were cool to the idea of seeing commercials in theaters, but they are growing to accept them the way European audiences have.
"Older people typically object more," Falk says. "Kids, on the other hand, or (those in the) 12- to 34-year-old group, they've grown up with television and it doesn't really bother them."
Falk stresses that Cinemark, which runs the theaters at Gateway Mall, runs its advertisements only before the scheduled show times. Trips to both theaters confirmed that, for the most part, commercial programming did indeed begin and end before the posted start times.
Cinema World was less exact about starting its advertisements early, starting them both before and after the scheduled show times.
Locally, screened children's movies are not immune from pre-show advertising.
While Cinemark showed fewer ads than normal during its screening of "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat," Cinema World led its showing with two public service announcements, five movie trailers and 10 com- mercials.
Not everyone is bothered by pre-movie promos. Meni Hai, 24, an Israeli exchange student at the University of Oregon who until recently worked in a movie theater in Jerusalem, says advertising is just part of going to the movies. In Israel, he says, the standard arrangement is to show two product advertisements and three film trailers.
"I don't think it (the pre-show entertainment) is supposed to be long," Hai said. "I don't think it should be more than 15 minutes (long)."
One of the few locally screened Hollywood movies to start before the 15-minute mark was a Cinemark showing of "The Cat in the Hat," which featured a 14 1/2 -minute windup.
At Eugene's art house theater, the Bijou Art Cinemas, ads are not even an issue. The two-screen cinema shows three to four trailers and zero commercials before its indie movies.
The theater does project slides advertising local businesses and artists before the lights go down, but the average pre-show at the Bijou runs eight minutes, manager Louise Thomas says.
"Besides the fact that I know our customers would hate it (commercial advertising), I've never been approached by Coke."
If the Bijou is the least commercial theater in town, Cinema World may be the most ad saturated. Based on a small sample of films screening at both Cinema World and Cinemark 17, Cinema World movies tended to include more advertising.
The protest movement
While filmgoers who are fed up with advertising would seem to have little recourse, there are a number of national organizations that have sprung up in recent years.
In addition to the aforementioned Portland group, a Web site called Stop Pre-Movie Ads - found at www .shinybluegrasshopper.com/nomovieads/ - lists ad-free movie theaters by state. A group called Commercial Alert is asking viewers to speak the words "no commercials" when a pre-movie ad is shown on screen.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader wants theaters to be required by law to start listing the actual start times of the films. And there's a class action lawsuit pending against the Loews Theater chain that alleges consumer fraud on the part of the company.
"In business, nothing is set in stone," says Jason Thompson, director of the Captive Motion Picture Audience of America. "If theaters and studios see that their bottom lines are being adversely affected rather than enhanced by ad placement, they will re-evaluate their practices."
Lewis Taylor can be reached at 338-2512 or ltaylor @guardnet.com.
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It's not just the quantity, it's the quality
December 19, 2003
It's not just quantity, but also the ad quality
It isn't just the number of pre-movie ads that bothers some local film fans, but the type of ads being shown.
One common complaint is that many of the commercials being screened in the theater are the same ones being shown on television. Ads for GoArmy .com, Samsung and MasterCard are now showing both in theaters and at home.
"Those ads, they don't look good on the big screen, because I think they're just projected video," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of the Los Angeles box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
"They (advertisers) may start either making the quality of these TV spots look nicer or actually creating spots primarily to be shown in theaters, making them more cinematic."
Video game makers have started doing just that, hiring the people who make movie previews to make their ads. And they've been screening these more cinematic ads both in theaters and on TV, says Eric Archer, an editor at the Ant Farm, a Los Angeles company that produces film trailers.
Ant Farm recently started making movie-style previews for other products, such computer games.
Since many viewers enjoy trailers but don't like the product ads, videogame makers may have hit upon a successful strategy. The "coolness" quotient of trailers seems only to be increasing, says Archer, who has edited trailers for "Love Actually" and the latest remake of "Peter Pan."
"Trailers used to be more of just a coming attraction. They've evolved into almost self-contained works in and of themselves, which are sometimes even events.
"Trailers for `The Lord of the Rings' trilogy or `The Matrix' trilogy or any of the `Star Wars' films, people - at least here in Los Angeles - will line up to see a movie, just because those trailers will be playing beforehand. That's definitely not something that happened 10 years ago."
Terrell Falk, a spokeswoman for Cinemark, would like to see product advertisements that screen in theaters attain a similar kind of following. In Europe, where pre-movie advertising is a common occurrence, she says theater ads have already earned such a cachet.
"The theater ads there - they're different than what you'd see anywhere else," Falk says. "They're like Super Bowl ads; they're special.
"Once the advertising industry understands, `Oh, this (theater advertising) is like doing a Super Bowl thing,' then I think it (will) be even more accepted."
- Lewis Taylor
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Chains: It's a survival issue
December 19, 2003
Chains: It's a survival issue
By Lewis Taylor
The Register-Guard
While smaller theaters such as Eugene's Bijou Art Cinemas can survive without programming commercials before their films, the big theater chains say they've been forced find other revenue streams - and that includes selling ad space.
"What we have is a wonderful facility, but it's a box, and we don't own the product; we have to lease the product," says Terrell Falk, a spokeswoman for Cinemark. "We don't own those movies, we don't have any part of it. We are just renting it. And in turn, you pay us to see it (the movie) in our beautiful box, but there is a big cost to rent that (movie)."
Not only do the multiplexes have high overheads, but they also don't earn much money during opening weekend, says Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office tracker Exhibitor Relations. The arrangement varies from film to film and studio to studio, but in some cases theater chains must fork over as much as 80 percent of what they rake in at the box office.
"I think there's a misconception on the part of moviegoers that when a film makes $80 million in its opening weekend, that a big part of that is going to the theater, but it's not," Dergarabedian says.
"The reason a studio gets their money back first is because they ponied up the money for the marketing and the production budget. As time goes on - it's a sliding scale - the theaters start getting a bigger percentage of the box office as the film plays."
Compounding the problem: Many national giants still are hurting from a theater building boom in the 1990s that left many of them carrying more debt than they could handle, says Brandon Gray, a box office analyst for Box Office Mojo.com.
As a result, at least a dozen chains filed for bankruptcy in 2001-02, including Regal Cinemas, which operates the Cinema World multiplex in Eugene.
"They actually shot themselves in the foot, because more theaters meant that more people could see movies in the opening weekend, and that's when the studios get the biggest cut of the grosses," Gray says.
"The movies open absolutely everywhere (and) people don't have to wait for them anymore. If you go to the theater it's, `Oh, I missed the 9 o'clock. Well, there's a 9:15 starting.'
"It's very rare that you'll get an absolute sell out."
With big movies such as "The Last Samurai" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" showing locally on at least four screens, it's easy to see what Gordon is talking about. But some consumer advocates say the money woes of big chains doesn't excuse the fact that captive, paying audiences are being subjected to TV-style commercials they weren't expecting.
"Theaters are not placing ads as entertainment for their customers," says Jason Thompson of Portland's Captive Motion Picture Audience of America. "They are placing them as a desperate effort to fund the mistakes of their overexpansion and bad business practices.
"Theaters and studios have a mutually beneficial relationship. If the theaters are struggling, they need to renegotiate these relationships rather than holding their audiences captive to unwanted messages."
Regal, the country's largest chain, is hoping to short-circuit some of the criticism coming from viewers with a 20-minute pre-show that takes the place of pre-movie ads and makes no bones about what it is.
Dubbed "The 2wenty," the program starts roughly 20 minutes before show time and includes entertainment, news shorts, music videos and ads. The 2wenty already has started showing in some Portland theaters, and may debut at Cinema World sometime in 2004.
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Tim Reed
Better Projection Pays
Posts: 5246
From: Northampton, PA
Registered: Sep 1999
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posted 12-20-2003 04:46 PM
quote:
at [Regal] Cinema World 8, the same film begins with 23 minutes of pre-feature promos.
And to think, one of the reasons circuits gave when they stopped buying cartoons was they didn't have time for them.
quote:
"Those ads, they don't look good on the big screen, because I think they're just projected video,"
That's right, they are video transfers to 35mm, which look like crap. One of the policies we institued when we formed Screen Attractions was quality would be our top priority. We flat out refuse to do videotape transfers. No need for it, especially since 99% of those commercials are shot on film to begin with! We just produce straight to 35mm, no fuss, no muss.
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