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Author Topic: What makes a Successful Single Screen Theatre Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-21-2011 10:31 PM                     Guys, You have to realize that Mike put in Digital just so he could watch his favorite Blu-Rays on the big screen! For real! Mark  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-21-2011 11:13 PM                        Well...that certainly isn't a DISadvantage!  |  IP: Logged Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 04-22-2011 03:47 PM                     quote: Mike Blakesley It's surprising how few people constitutes "everybody" to a teenager ..and with a lot of the stuff that's coming out, it really makes you wonder that the majority of the films are definitely geared to the teenager/young adult due to they haven't reached the plateau of being a "grown-up" and learned how to manage money, but just love to blow it on the fly since they want to get out of the house and do their thing...which is keeping the industry alive.. One can see the "supply and demand" syndrome here pretty easily. -Monte  |  IP: Logged Robert E. Allen Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1078 From: Checotah, Oklahoma Registered: Jul 2002 posted 04-22-2011 05:27 PM                     Jonathan: You have received some good advise here. To me two key elements for a successful single-screener are be different (especially in a competitive situation) and be consistent (especially with your operating hours.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 04-26-2011 03:58 PM                        One thing that no-one has mentioned here is promotion and advertising. You can be playing the hottest movie around but nobody's going to be coming to see it unless they know that it's playing at your theatre. Advertising options in a small town are generally pretty limited. When I first opened my theatre I had an ad in the local weekly newspaper because that's what you do, right? Advertise in the paper? I did that every week for some years until the period when the first Spiderman movie was released. I had it booked for a week and the paper got mixed up and advertised it as "Now Playing" one week prior to when it was actually going to be here. Oh hell, I thought, when I saw that, and braced myself for angry customers coming in all week for the movie that wasn't actually playing. "I drove 40 miles to see this!" and that sort of thing, right? Well, the week went by and I had a grand total of exactly zero customers come in to see the Spiderman movie that wasn't here. After that I quit advertising in the paper. Obviously, nobody was reading that ad anyway. Up until shortly before I converted my theatre to digital cinema, I always printed and mailed out a monthly flyer, sent as "unaddressed admail" to 6000 mailboxes in Melville and 18 surrounding towns and villages. That's always been my main advertising but when I converted to digital my booking agent talked me into trying to play newer product that I couldn't book sufficiently far in advance to print a flyer off of. Now my main advertising is on the Internet. My webpage and an email mailing list that I set up to send automatic emails to customers who sign up for the updates to what's playing. I sent out 6000 fridge magnets to the towns I was sending flyers to with my website address and "24 hour recording" phone number on it, in envelopes with a write-up about the digital cinema conversion and whatnot on it. I actually had 10,000 magnets printed so I have the remainder out to customers who ask what's playing when they walk in the door. Now that I've been running without a flyer for a couple of months I have discovered that it doesn't seem to make any difference in my turn-out at all. If anything, I seem be drawing more people from further away than before. Times certainly have changed. A friend of mine who owned the theatre in the town I used to live in before I moved here never really knew what to do to advertise his movies until one day he decided to print and mail out flyers and then his business literally tripled. But that was 20+ years back and now it seems that the place to be is online rather than in mailboxes. Which suits me fine -- I've been spending around $1000/month on postage alone mailing out those flyers. Website impressions and email are effectively free. I had thought/hoped that the digital cinema alone would bring more people in the door but that hasn't happened. As I've been reading here in comments from others, nobody knows what it is so nobody really cares. As always, it all comes down to the movie -- get the right movie, everybody's here. Get the wrong movie, they stay away in droves. I have been getting a lot of people telling me how wonderful the new 5.1 sound system is, though, so people definitely notice that a lot more than they notice the improvement in the picture.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 04-29-2011 05:11 PM                        We still advertise in the local paper but I don't think it's too effective. One time, they mistakenly ran the ad for the previous week. We didn't get any phone calls or comments about it at all. I keep it in there though for 2 reasons -- first, sometimes if a movie appeals to the "older" crowd they probably will notice the ad in the paper, and second, it's good to have a nice relationship with the paper whenever we want to get an article printed. When we put our digital in, they gave us about a half-page of space with an article and a couple of pictures.  |  IP: Logged Bajsic Bojan Expert Film Handler Posts: 190 From: Ljubljana, Si, Eu Registered: Aug 2008 posted 04-29-2011 06:43 PM                     i dont have really any data which segment of our advertising is getting the most customers in (altho research was conducted and apparently it is a close one between internet mailings and word of mouth!), but we do run ads in most of the movie related papers, we do weekly fliers, we do lots of a1 posters on ad-walls, tons of emailings and regular distribution of monthly and weekly materials... at least once a week we are also present on the street handing out (cinema)balloons and fliers. i think every bit helps in its own way and attracts a different clientele (for different types of movies) and i wouldn't want to cut things.  |  IP: Logged

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