Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Anyone do Sat night Midnight movies?

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Posted by James Waite (Member # 4536) on 11-11-2013, 09:46 PM:

We are on a campus and do Friday Midnight cult movies during the school year. Our most popular is The Room but I try to mix it up. One of our other most popular is Mean Girls?!

I've been trying to decide whether to add Saturday showings of the same movies.

Pros-
minimum movie cost is the same whether I play it once or twice.
therefore the only real cost is staff.
No advertising cost as it can just piggyback on the regular advertising.

Cons-
will anyone show up? The students tend to go out on Sat which is why no one around here has ever tried much in the way of midnight movies on Sat.
My staff will hate me or at least dislike me a bit.

Does anyone do Midnight Movies on Saturday?

Posted by Manny Knowles (Member # 1171) on 11-11-2013, 10:23 PM:

You might want to do a trial run, programming a few Fri/Sat shows, and just see what happens.

If your shows are selling out, the extra show might catch some of the "overflow."

However, if your shows are not selling out, you could end up "diluting" your core audience over two evenings, with the added operational costs.

If a 2nd night is warranted, have you considered THURSDAY night? It's VERY common for students to avoid scheduling Friday classes. Thursday is often referred to as "Thirsty Thursday" or "Little Friday."

Posted by Mike Croaro (Member # 3123) on 11-11-2013, 10:56 PM:

Gteetings:

I say avoid them and go home early!

Mike C.

Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 11-12-2013, 08:51 AM:

Every market is different, and you can only find out by trial and error.

Are they really at midnight, or do you do them earlier? Maybe if you do them earlier your staff will only hate you a little.

Posted by Michael Putlack (Member # 6523) on 11-13-2013, 04:02 PM:

We actually do late screenings at 11pm on Saturdays. We've tried a few Friday/Saturday nights but have found pretty much the same number of people come out, just split in two days. If you're selling out those Friday night showings it might be worth it.

Posted by James Waite (Member # 4536) on 11-15-2013, 08:24 PM:

We do our shows at Midnight. Our evening shows often run until almost then. Tonight we only have 5 minutes between the late show and the midnight show.

We never sell out, it's a big theatre. the busiest show was one of the screenings of The Room and we still had 100 empty seats.

The thursday idea is intriguing. I think I'd have problems with staffing though and might get complaints from others. It's probably a heavier drinking night here than Saturday.

I guess I wonder how many people want to go but can't go Friday and might go Saturday.

A trial run would be the obvious thing to do but I usually do the whole term's advertising in advance. I make up a one sheet sized poster etc. Suppose I could figure something out.

Thanks
for the suggestions.

Posted by Michael Putlack (Member # 6523) on 11-16-2013, 11:08 AM:

You should update here after the trial run and tell us how it went!

Posted by James Waite (Member # 4536) on 11-18-2013, 10:15 PM:

I put a casual poll on our website and the response so far is largely in favour of having movies on Sat.

I'm going to try it with our first two weekends in January and decide from there. Both should do well at least on the Friday, Mean Girls first and both Kill Bill movies playing the next weekend with a short intermission (food sales!).

I have to play Kill Bills off Blu-ray but our IT guy has software that can pull the movies off the blu-rays (legal in Canada) and then I can use DVD-O matic to convert to DCP. We did it with Monty Python and the Holy Grail and it looked fantastic.

Posted by James Waite (Member # 4536) on 07-04-2014, 03:29 AM:

Just realized I never let you know the results.

As usual the results were inconclusive. We had some weekends where Saturday was busier than Friday and vice versa. Overall I think we just spread the same number of people out over two shows. However there were some mitigating factors.

All our movies did poorly last year, the students just didn't seem to know we were there, too busy looking at their phones.

This was the coldest winter here in decades, and we seemed to get a storm every weekend.

The buses here stop at midnight so combine that with the cold and you get fewer people willing to come out.

I haven't yet decided whether to go back to fridays or continue doing saturdays as well.

Thanks for all your advice.

Posted by Terry Lynn-Stevens (Member # 7349) on 07-11-2014, 04:16 PM:

Many theaters around here do 10:50-11:15pm shows on weekends. They are still popular, but I havent seen midnight shows for at least 10 years.