Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Premieres policies in Spain

This is topic Premieres policies in Spain in forum Ground Level at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Juan Jose Garcia Calvo (Member # 1702) on 03-11-2014, 07:15 AM:

Here in Spain the exhibition industry is getting worse and worse.
Economic incomes is dwindling and every week more cinemas are closing , and this is bad for both exhibitors to distributors.
However, some film distributors are more worried with getting good average revenue for each copy of their films than the total gain achieved by this film .
This way, they deny premieres (first week) in theaters of small towns because this could get down the average box office per copy, knowing that weeks later the box office will be less, so that the final benefits of each film are lower than they could be. Lower benefits for the film exhibitors, lower too for the film distributors.
Before, with the 35mm system, there was no copies available to everyone, but now with Digital system, distributors could release simultaneously their films in all the theaters in their countries without any extra cost for them, considering they don't need to make more DCP's drives for us, the little cinema owners, as we are that we deal borrow DCPs drives with larger cinemas ourselves, download them to our servers and then return them .
It can seem as they want to wangle numbers to their heads distributors offering a distorted data. Will they be aware of this at the headquarters of the Majors in USA, UK...?
I can't understand this distribution policy. Can anybody explain me this?
Does this occur in other countries?
Could EDI/RENTRAK statistics be responsible of this?

Posted by Michael Putlack (Member # 6523) on 03-11-2014, 11:33 AM:

This is how it is done in the US as well. A major release may open at 3000 theatres, but there are still a lot of other smaller theatres that need to wait a week or a few weeks before the release trickles on down to them. I agree with you that I think it has to do with wanting to boost their per theatre average.

Posted by Peter Howard (Member # 3491) on 03-12-2014, 05:45 AM:

In the current environment where a drive is soooo cheap, it's completely the wrong way for distribution to go in my opinion. They should, in almost all cases, be as wide as possible.

At the end of the day, those cinemas NOT screening the film are still getting people enquiring about the title at the box office because national marketing is in full effect in the leadup to, and first week post-release.

Once the caravan moves on to another title, the interest wanes, and thus the potential audience. So surely you want to snap those $$$ up when they're there for the taking!

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 03-12-2014, 03:31 PM:

It's my understanding that the average per-screen revenue for the first two weeks of a movie are the important ones for the studios as they use those numbers in negotiations for things like future television play and whatnot.

Therefore, it must be to their advantage to pump that average up as much as possible.