1. How many screens do you have?
2. Do you have to order trailers yourself (or your company does it), or do you receive automatic shipments from the film companies?
3. How many trailers for a typical film do you receive? (Total of flat & scope)
4. How many trailers do you receive that never get used?
5. Do you send trailers back? If not, what do you do with them (give to another theatre, storage, disposal, etc?)
6. If a small theatre in your vicinity wanted to acquire your excess/used trailers, would you (or could you) cooperate?
Answers to these questions will be greatly appreciated, along with any other comments you might have about how to solve this problem. Thanks in advance.
Mike Blakesley
Roxy Theatre
1) Thirty
2) Actually all three, some companies like Buena Vista, Paramount, and Sony send them on their own, my manager orders Universal, New Line Cinema, and MGM, Lion's Gate, Fox. MGM hardly ever sends anything.
3) It depends on how many of whatever they have sent before, but usually two, four or six, half Scop, half Flat.
4) When its all said and done, about one or two trailers never get used. But when they send us alot like Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Me, Myself, and Irene, I'll never use that many.
5) The policy is to throw them away, but I try to send some back, and the rest I keep to build up in one giant trailer pack so when I train new people they can practice threading, and running a projector with that.
6) I wouldn't mind handing a couple over, but I think my managers would.
My business partner (Ian...who is a frequent poster to this forum) and I operate a 5 screen arthouse in Northern California. I find the whole trailer thing very frustrating as most of the companies we deal with won't release trailers to us until we have a firm date. Once we have a firm date trailers have either been all gobbled up by the major markets. There are some exceptions - Consolidated Poster Service which handles all of Sony Pictures Classics stuff is great and I always make sure to return their trailers promptly. Miramax is frequently frustrating as they seem to send stuff out to their regular clients and then there is nothing left at National Screen.
Sometimes I want 5 trailers of something and we frequently show 6 or 7 films in our 5 plex - the most I've ever gotten is 3 - usually 2 flat one scope.
We return most trailers, however, we have also "adopted" a small market theatre whose operator is a friend of ours and he gets all the unsolicited stuff we get sent and the trailers we are done with that don't need to be returned or we ask him to return them to the trailer service when they are finished with them.
If I order trailers, I make sure I use them. Since I pay for shipping of trailers I order, I don't order stuff I don't need.
Good luck. Thanks. Ky
Personally, I really don't see the point of returning trailers; it's a waste of postage costs and it's nice to keep old trailers around in case the theatre brings a given film back and for training/demonstration purposes. I did, however, return anything that specifically said "return this after use" in the packaging material.
12
>>2. Do you have to order trailers yourself (or your company does it), or do you receive automatic shipments from the film companies?
They usually come automaticly. Sometimes
we'll order more if we didn't get enough, but that rarely does any good.
>>3. How many trailers for a typical film do you receive? (Total of flat & scope)
Depends on the company. Fox- 6 to 7 of each. Disney the same. Paramount 3 or 4 each. Ne Line 2 or 3, 4 if its a big movie, each. The rest seem to be sent out at random.
>>4. How many trailers do you receive that never get used?
If the competeing theatre in town has that movie booked, which means we won't show it, we don't use them at all.
>>5. Do you send trailers back? If not, what do you do with them (give to another theatre, storage, disposal, etc?)
If I'm sent a pre-paid label I always send them back. If not, they go into 'storage' for a while and eventually end up getting thrown away.
>>6. If a small theatre in your vicinity wanted to acquire your excess/used trailers, would you (or could you) cooperate?
Yes we would.
They arrive automatically. We use what we are able to.
The rest are heaped in piles.
I used to work for Cinema USA (now defunct) and we had to beg for trailers.
There is no intelligence involved with trailer distribution! I think it must be a government thing! (LOL)
Russ
Mike Blakesley
#2. We've found that our theatres that have ALWAYS been First Run get stuff automatically shipped to us. Our theatres that we've ressurected from Discount have more trouble. We assume there is a list that somebody needs to put us on, but nobody ever seems to do so. We end up having to order specific trailers for our lesser theatres.
ALSO - Having a good repore with Exhibitor Relations Reps. helps a lot. We are in GREAT with New Line - they love us. We ask for it... they send it.
#3. Technicolor only allows HALF of your total screens in trailers. They don't understand that sometimes you play more than one film in each house, but still, it makes sense for your typical first run theatre.
#4. I would say about half. Most of the time it's because all of our movies are Scope - and they sent us mostly FLAT trailers. Other times it's just because we're too darn lazy to change the trailers for something new. (It's not a trailer unless it's ingrained into your memory for an eternity)
#5. NOPE - Trailers end up getting sent to the District Manager - which he then takes home and throws in a box in his film vault in hopes that one day he'll want 50 copies of a Stuart Little preview.
#6. If such a small theatre were on friendly terms with our company, then yes. We like helping out the smaller guys when we can, as long as we aren't competing for the same product.
2. Combination of both - when I receive my weekly trailer requests from corporate, I look in the cabinet and see what I have, then order what I need to fulfill the requests.
3. 2 Flat/2 Scope (or so...depends, there's no set amount)
4. Maybe 2-3/week.
5. Send them to our discount theatre in Omaha, NE.
6. No, my material is already spoken for.
2. Trailers are automatically shipped to us
3. 8 flat and 8 scope (that's an average sometimes it's more (like the fifteen copies of "15 Minutes" we were sent!)
4. We throw away about half of any given title
5. No, don't return them. We usually throw them away. Only very rarely do we get the pre-paid return shipping bags, and when we do, it's only for one company. Depending on what's comming out, we may throw out about 30-40 trailers every two weeks. No one has the time to sort out just one company's trailers, and then throw the rest away.
6. Generally, we would give them to any one who asked, but they would have to come and get them. We would not pay for shipping, or even pay for a person's time to sort them.
We keep a "core" for several weeks with the trailers we want- we reuse the core, so we don't need that many trailers. We've tried telling this to the distributors hoping they will send less, but the trailers keep comming.
I just threw out about 40 trailers the other day! Now, note that we are not allowed to throw them out until the picture actually opens. So these trailers are for films that have already opened.
If you still would want them, e-mail me and we'll try to work something out.
At the same time it is sad that the samll theatres who can least afford the material are seemingly forced to purchase the items on ebay or go without. Capitalism at its finest.....Aint America Great!
9 screens
Trailers are all shipped automatically, extras are sometimes ordered
Anywhere from 1 of each up to 10, depends on how much that particular studio wants to push their film
Up to half of these trailers will never be used
We have received many pre-paid shipping labels with which to return trailers to their studios. I use the leftover boxes that our nacho chips came in, one for each studio. When the box fills up, I stick a label on it and ship it out.
Some studios do not send free labels. I would be willing to share these and any others I could hand off on the sly.
-Mike
1. 10
2. We get sent them.
3. Usually 2-6, sometimes more, and sometimes
lots of shipments of the same trailer.
4. *Alot*, I have seperate boxes for each individual company and the fox one gets full often, universal as well maybe 100 trailers fit in each box.
5. I try my hardest to send trailers back, I have seperate boxes for each company that I am able to send trailers back to. Fox always gets a big box of 100 trailers every once in awhile from me, and the best is warner bros. who you can call and get these bags pre labeled for ups and you can stick trailers in them and have them returned. It's good cause warner doesn't have many trailers sent to us. Also New line gets alot sent back, and I always try to send back to paramount seeing they have a $50 drawing every month (although I've never won :P) So basically I try to send back as many as I can (I'm big on the environment I guess).
6. Yes of course I would most definately do it.
Sorry for the long first post,
Aldo