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This topic comprises 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
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Topic: Day and Date Update
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-17-2016 12:30 PM
$50 is still a pretty good chunk of money. It's not hard for me to spend that much taking my girlfriend to the movies, especially if we see the movie in a premium priced auditorium. A lot of money can be saved by avoiding the concession stand, but if Lie-MAX is involved you're still going to be out $30-$35 on a pair of tickets alone. It would be hard not to spend over $50 taking a family of four to the movies.
In that respect, I might be able to see a service like Screening Room attracting customers who have 2 or more kids, multiple room mates or whatever circumstance has 4 or more people living under the same roof. It takes a group of people for the dollar savings to kick in, just like ordering a live PPV event. Otherwise the service is only going to appeal to douchey isolationists who don't want to soil themselves by watching a movie with other people in a theater.
quote: Mike Blakesley
We just had the highest grossing year in history and ticket sales are up over the previous few years. Why the #$%# do they want to "fix" what's not broken?
Bean Counter Blindness.
Investors want only one thing: MORE. The corporate bean counters are under incredible pressure to bring in more revenue, more profit, more, more, more even when the fact is the paying movie-going audience is only so big. Another inarguable fact: most movie goers are always on the lookout for the cheapest way to see a movie.
Most people would gladly choose watching a brand new movie release at home on their TV set if the movie was available at the same time it debuted in theaters. It's all about money. They only go to the theater to see the new must-see movie because that's the only option. It's either that or wait for the video release, which many are more than willing to do. Some people just aren't willing to pay much of anything to see a given movie, if they bother to watch it at all.
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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004
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posted 03-17-2016 09:44 PM
quote: Mike Blakesley
The perceived value of movies "in the home" is only about a buck or two.
This has, as one would expect, rattled around a bit on Reddit, and the biggest whine isn't about the $50 movie charge, which many folks, especially those with families, find reasonable, as long as you can pause the movie(!!!!), but the $150 for the set top box, mainly because everyone already has a flotilla of set top boxes.
My guess is that there will be a unique per-box watermark to track piracy, and that can't be done with existing set-top boxes.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-25-2016 10:56 PM
Here's an article in favor of the Screening Room from a Hollywood idiot, published in Variety of all places.
quote:
Hollywood v Sean Parker: The Case for Home Movie Services
by Kristopher Tapley
In the wake of the news that entrepreneur Sean Parker and former SFX Entertainment executive Prem Akkaraju have teamed up to launch Screening Room, a startup that offers new film releases in the home for $50, a number of major filmmakers have spoken out against the proposal, which was first reported by Variety.
Filmmakers including James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, Roland Emmerich and M. Night Shyamalan have lined up against the plan, while Screening Room’s all-star lineup of backers includes Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard.
But as I read the various critiques, offered via statements and tweets (it’s unclear if detractors have heard Parker and Akkaraju’s pitch themselves), I kept getting hung up on one particular assertion. “Jim [Cameron] and I are committed to the sanctity of the in-theater experience,” producer Jon Landau said. “The movie-going experience is something to fight for,” M. Night Shyamalan added.
Filmmakers need to put aside lofty rhetoric about the value of the theater-going experience and realize that modern audiences are already consuming film and TV in different ways.
Just ask Cary Fukunaga, Brad Pitt or Will Smith, all of whom are making movies — big and small — with Netflix.
“What I’ve learned is that most people, even my friends, if they have busy lives — they’re just going to watch on whatever platform is available to them,” said Fukunaga in an interview with Variety last year. “It’s just the reality of now, in terms of filmmaking.”
And have filmmakers like Cameron or Nolan actually been to the local multiplex lately, or is the “sanctity” reserved for their own private screening rooms?
The choral crunching of the loudest food known to man, the vague smell of feet, the entitlement of those whipping out their cell phones — this is not a sacred environment. For most, going to the movies isn’t a time of worship like it is for those in or dedicated to the film industry. It’s an escape. And unless you’re bent on changing human behavior, that isn’t likely to change.
Some companies — like the Arclight and Drafthouse theater chains — are committed to an ideal experience, booting audience members who text during the movie, preventing entry once the film begins, etc. But for as many years as those practices have been in place, they have remained premium realities rather than standardized ones.
Larger companies have implemented more substantial premium experiences, but they remain notably limited. For example, the aim with AMC Theatres’ recent partnership with Dolby Laboratories — “Dolby Cinema at AMC Prime,” which marries the comfort of the theater chain’s already-exclusive plush seating auditoriums with Dolby’s dual laser projection and state-of-the-art sound technology — is to have roughly 100 such venues up and running by 2024. Hardly wide-ranging, and by that time, things like Screening Room may have already changed the game anyway. (It’s worth noting that AMC has signed a letter of intent to partner with Screening Room.)
Nolan, who echoed Landau and Cameron’s joint thoughts on the service without detailing his own, has spoken about the less-than-ideal theater-going experience in the past. “For some reason, it has become acceptable to say we are providing this empty room with a TV in it,” he said at the BFI London Film Festival in October. “We’re not putting on a show. That has to change, and if that experience for the audience is not valued, people will stop going.”
He went on to decry a growing trend among repertory theaters of projecting Blu-rays. “Exhibitors need to put their best foot forward and have standards,” he said. “No cinema should be showing a consumer grade format to an audience.”
But what incentive do theaters really have to provide an ideal viewing experience? It’s no secret that exhibitors are as focused on the popcorn and candy business as the movie business. Their money is made at the concession stand, not in the brutal percentage game of box office receipts. I remember my days working in a theater where management refused to replace projector bulbs running at 40% illumination because of the expense and the screens were stained from God knows what.
The whole brick-and-mortar paradigm is obviously crumbling, judging by the fate of record and book stores. So why should movie theaters be any different, particularly if there isn’t much interest in “putting on a show,” as Nolan said? And even if there was interest, there’s not a lot to bolster confidence. Quentin Tarantino made his best pitch for offering audiences a unique theatrical experience with his “Hateful Eight” roadshow in December, projected in 70mm at 100 venues nationwide, many of them retrofitted with new projectors. The film brought in only $6.6 million during that limited engagement and distributor The Weinstein Co. seemed eager to get it out into the multiplex marketplace, pulling the wide release up a week.
So while I’m sure there’s a fair rebuttal to Screening Room, I don’t think “the sanctity of the in-theater experience” is it. That’s not to say there aren’t inherent concerns, though.
For instance, we still don’t have details on the service’s “robust anti-piracy strategy,” as Jackson put it in his statement. That was a sticking point for the Art House Convergence, a specialty cinema org representing 600 theaters that issued a statement in opposition to Screening Room. My question is, what’s to stop someone from Periscoping an entire film? That proved to be a problem for HBO and Showtime during last May’s Mayweather-Pacquiao boxing match, as countless viewers simply used their smartphones to re-transmit the fight.
Also, will there be a premium or ban on commercial venues? For the MayPac fight, bars paid anywhere between $6,500 and $15,500, depending on capacity (compared to the $89.95 consumer rate). Will a venue simply be able to purchase one of these set-top boxes for $150 and exhibit the latest release every weekend to its clientele?
I imagine a number of the big-time backers that Parker and Akkaraju have assembled have wanted to embrace this inevitable shift for some time. The difference now, given that the Screening Room plan will send as much as 40% of the $50 fee to exhibitors, is that they’ve been presented with an option that doesn’t cut theatrical out of the equation. The proposed service “does not play off studio against theater owner … it respects both,” Jackson said. “Screening Room was the only solution that supports all stakeholders in the industry,” added Ron Howard and producing partner Brian Grazer.
And perhaps some of the ancillary business concerns — particularly the video and on-demand revenue — would be rendered less relevant if some first-time audiences were paying $50, rather than $5, to see a new movie like “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
More importantly, growing the business by expanding the audience is a stated goal. Movie-going has been flat in recent years, with ticket sales hitting a 20-year low in 2014. Right now, only 11% of Americans and Canadians frequent the cinema, per a report from the Motion Picture Assn. of America, and 32% of the entire U.S. and Canadian population doesn’t go at all. Meanwhile, the theatrical window has continued to collapse. Two years ago, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted that within a decade, films would be available on a pay-per-screen-size model as few as 17 days after their theatrical opening.
The National Assn. of Theater Owners copped to all of this turbulence in its official response to the Screening Room news. “More sophisticated window modeling may be needed for the growing success of a modern movie industry,” the org said, adding for good measure that “those models should be developed by distributors and exhibitors in company-to-company discussions, not by a third party.”
Whoever develops the model, the time has come. And next month’s CinemaCon — an annual exhibition confab hosted by NATO — will likely mark the dawn of an epic showdown in Hollywood.
Variety article
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-26-2016 01:09 AM
Observations about this article:
1. The writer completely fails to even acknowledge the fact commercial movie theaters are literally the bedrock supporting the movie industry. If there are no movie theaters there is no movie industry. Simple as that. The situation is honestly a pretty fragile one. Major theater chains are operating on not so wide profit margins. With all the mergers and leveraged buy outs increasing their debt loads it makes the chains more vulnerable to down-turns in audience numbers. The down-turns can happen via lack of hit movies. It can also happen if audiences have an attractive alternative to watching the movie in a theater.
2. I'm baffled by the idea guys like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese would supposedly be in favor of something like this Screening Room scheme.
3. The writer mentions high end premium concepts like Dolby Cinema, complaining such systems are installed in a very limited number of theaters. Has this guy checked out just how much it costs to install a full blown Dolby Cinema system or IMAX with Laser? We're talking between $1 million and $2 million per screen. And that's in an EXISTING theater! Does he even know how much it costs to install an "ordinary" digital projection system with "ordinary" 5.1 surround sound? What about all the other operational costs in a movie theater? Does he think all that stuff is free? He almost hints at the issue when mentioning the old story about bad movie theaters running their lamps at dim levels to save money. But he failed to realize that's something you can't (or shouldn't) be doing with a very costly d-cinema setup. On the other hand, would there be any required presentation standards for home viewers to watch movies via the Screening Room service? How will an esteemed filmmaker backing this service feel about his product only being watched on an ordinary TV set with sound from ordinary, tinny TV speakers?
4. The writers picks on The Hateful Eight release and 70mm film as a premise of saying audiences don't appreciate a good film presentation. He failed to notice QT's own mistake of shooting an ultra-wide, large format movie mostly in a fucking dark log cabin and with a whole shit load of talking. He also failed to notice the damned Star Wars sequel hogging nearly all the best available screens where 70mm would have performed better. QT and Weinstein should have waited until about late March or April to release the movie at the very least.
5. This 40%-50% cut Screening Room "promises" to exhibitors, just how exactly would that be divided? I smell some bullshit wafting off that. The big boys (AMC, Regal, Cinemark) would probably get a taste. I'd be willing to bet smaller chains would be cut out completely. Even if the big chains got some revenue from this distribution model it definitely would not be enough to offset per person ticket sales losses. A big group of people could have a movie watching party, making that $50 per movie fee a cheap bargain. All those people in that group each would have had to pay a first run theater ticket price otherwise.
6. The writer seems to scoff at AMC's modest 100 screen plan for Dolby Cinema @ AMC Prime, saying that Screening Room probably will have changed the game by then. Uh, yeah, if the Screening Room concept and others like it establish a good enough foothold they will "change the game." They will change the game by eliminating it (the movie industry) completely. We'll just have broadcast TV and cable after the fuck-tards "change the game." Even after that game is changed, the de-evolution of TV will continue to devolve. Cable TV relies a good bit on re-broadcasting movies. The electronics industry will take it up the ass too. Who in their right mind will want to buy a huge OLED TV screen or surround sound system if the only new content they get to watch is TV series, TV movies and Fox News™. That stuff can be watched on a computer monitor or a freaking phone.
7. The only valid point the writer made in his article is certain bad practices of movie theater chains. Showing Blu-ray discs of repertory movies is just plain bad. But that's more the fault of the movie studios and not the movie theater chains. The studios are the ones supplying the content and quality of that content. That one is all on them, not the theaters. However, the movie theaters are on the hook for getting control of their auditoriums. Most of the big chain theaters move customers through the complex like cattle moving through a feed lot. Commercial theaters absolutely have to get tough with maintaining a proper movie going environment. Mobile phone use and other distractions or disruptions should not be tolerated at all. The writer kind of scoffs at the "sanctity" of the movie-going experience. Well, that "sanctity" is something that's really only earned by good movie theaters. If the movie theater is going to treat its operation no better than a fast food chain then it deserves to fall into oblivion.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 03-26-2016 09:13 PM
In addition to all of Bobby's points (which, Bobby, you should distill into a letter-to-the-editor and send it to Variety), here are some things about that article that make my blood boil:
1. Like many articles of this type, he trots out the same old tired list of things that sometimes happen in theaters and infers that the theatrical moviegoing experience is terrible, 100% of the time. Things like sticky floors, everybody using their cell, everybody talking, people getting shot at, etc etc are the "norm" rather than the "exception" according to him. Well, that's NOT true. What these writers are really saying is, "I don't like going out to the movies so *I* should be able to stream them at home." Personal self-interest trumps everything to these guys.
2. He assumes that day-and-date is inevitable, just because people want that. Forget about whether it's good for the industry or not. It's just gotta happen! People want day and date, sure -- but they don't want to spend a lot of money for it. They want to spend a couple of bucks, or have new movies on their Netflix queue, just like they spend for 3-month-old movies now.
3. He makes a big deal out of the fact that only 11% of the people in this country ever go out to the movies. Well....I would say that far less people than that ever go out to live concerts. Certainly, the average concertgoer goes less frequently than the average moviegoer goes to the movies. The majority of people in this country don't USUALLY go out to dinner. In other words, most people not going to the movies is NO BIG DEAL. When it comes to recreational stuff, there's not much stuff that MOST people do. Hell, MOST people don't even watch the average hit TV show.
What really pisses me off the most about this whole thing is the nice language NATO uses when they respond to these dumb ideas. Instead of being all nice, they should say "Look, studios: You have already decimated the theater industry by shrinking the video window to 90 days. If you hadn't done that, and if you would crack down on screener piracy, we'd probably still have 30 or 40% of the people in the country going to the movies, instead of 11%. Now, even with the 11%, we've just given you a record-breaking year. So will you please, for the love of God, STOP SCREWING with the window, or YOU WILL DESTROY the movie industry completely. Do you understand that? YOU ARE GOING TO RUIN YOUR OWN BUSINESS, AND OURS."
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 03-27-2016 01:26 PM
It's all about giving more value to shareholders.
Honestly, that's the prime motivation at the core of this short-sighted idiocy. If you're an executive at a movie studio, a global media company or even a start-up like Screening Room, making a bunch of money directly in the stock market is the main goal. If the company's stock price jumps a few points you, as the executive, will get paid big fat freaking bonuses from the shareholders' board of directors. Maybe you'll get a huge salary increase. And, of course, there will be extra padding put into that golden parachute when the time comes for you to leave the company in a few short years. It doesn't matter if you're fired, you sell out or what ever. Executives always have some kind of exit strategy.
As for doing things that are "good for the industry," not too many of these guys are thinking about the long term health of movie studios and commercial movie theaters. I think they just want to make all the money they can in the shortest amount of time possible. Any destructive consequences that develop years later are of little interest to them. They'll let some other executive worry about that when the time comes. Sounds a little similar to our goofed up political process here.
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James Wyrembelski
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 114
From: Beaverton, MI, USA
Registered: Sep 2015
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posted 03-27-2016 07:19 PM
I like a lot of what Mike says
I dont understand the high negativity placed on theaters. Its honestly rare I ever have had an issue with the whole "sticky floors, texters, etc." mantra constantly used. 95% of the time everyone in the auditorium is quiet and respectful.
And only 11% go out to the movies? So? How many go bowling, golfing, casinos, concerts, plays, and all the other forms of entertainment more than a few times a year?
Yes, there are a select group of people that prop up the industry...i see that stat commonly used. same could be said about other industries as well. Some never go see a movie....me....I've went maybe about 20 times in the last year alone.
Might be going off topic or on a rant here but just let me go...heh...
I like to compare bowling alleys for some reason. Roughly 18% of the population have bowled at least once per year. A bit better than theaters but by no means a large chunk. Less than 1% are league players (which most likely are the patrons propping them up)
As an example Ive heard so many use bowling alleys as an example comparable to theaters (among other industries) as a dying industry because only an X amount of people bowl or only bowling alleys in largely populated areas seem to have enough to succeed. Yet, in our small town of 1200 people you can find that ALL 16 lanes are full with league players Thursday-Sunday from October-April.....Yes, the summer months are slow...but so is every other business during their "off season"....and yes...it IS the leagues that mostly prop the business up.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2015/05/10/bowling-final-frames-roll/27070351/
"It may be it is part of a broader decline in social engagement," said Wayne State University assistant sociology professor David Merolla. "But people's social tastes change, too. It's also possible bowling isn't what people do anymore."
Hansell, who has been in the bowling business since the 1960s, takes the view that there still are more frames to play.
While league bowling isn't what it once was, in part because folks don't have the time to commit to it, he said, it's still popular, with more than 67 million people bowling at least once last year."
If you replaced "bowling alley" with theater in the above article it sounds all too alike...which is why I use it as an example.
It just feels like what it comes down to sometimes (more with theaters simply due to the type of product) is that we should just skip this step and go straight to in home delivery....lets just stream movies and bowl on the Wii...gamble online...shop online.... and only leave to go to work....why EVER leave the house...its not as if there's an actual world out there you know? So what if the theater industry is pulling in record numbers and is a 12 billion dollar industry....or why would bowling alleys attempt to keep their 5 billion dollar industry alive? We wouldn't miss the 4,000 businesses or the almost 200K jobs between the two. Huh...makes no sense to me what so ever.
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Mitchell Dvoskin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1869
From: West Milford, NJ, USA
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted 03-28-2016 11:39 AM
There are big difference between movie theatres and bowling alleys.
First, If you want to bowl, you need to go out. If you want to watch a motion picture, you have lots of options other than a theatre.
Second, bowling alleys are not paying 50% to 95% of their revenue to their equipment supplier, forever, for the privilege of renting the alleys, scoreboards, and pin resetting machines. Theatres are paying 50% to 95% for the privilege of renting the movie(s) they are showing.
Third, the equipment suppliers for bowling alleys are not spending their days trying to undercut commercial venues with various bowl at home schemes.
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