It seems to tie into another popular misconception we seem to see regularly: that of why some years' overall box office are better than others. All kinds of complex reasons are put forward for this one as everyone tries to explain why this year is better than last year, and so on. And they always seem to miss the point. That this year, there's a bunch of pictures out that audiences want to go to see. And that's it.
Because we're all engaged in the business of making movies, and we have to (rightly) focus on bottom lines, percentages, margins, etc, it's easy to lose sight of what we're really doing. Playing roulette.
Black, in the form of The Dark Knight, just won big.
Sure, it helps that they opened on over 4000 screens, but people are excited to see it. The reports coming back from those that have are overwhelmingly positive. So more people will go. And this is regardless of all the side-bar hype, largely focused on the late Heath Ledger, his death having, sadly, been turned into a marketing tool.
I've always been of the opinion that:
a) regardless of all the clever-clever one can throw at a film marketing campaign, the most important thing is to tell the audience what they're actually buying so they won't feel jerked around - we rely on them so much that caveat emptor should never apply, but it is remarkable how often this crops up. Selling Three Kings on the tagline "It's Good To Be King" - are you kidding me? This is a war movie about a heist which evolves into something entirely different and much more serious. It is not a comedy (though it has some funny bits). Anyone who's bought a ticket to have some escapist laughs will be wondering what the hell they've walked into as soon as they hit the sequence explaining exactly what happens when a bullet rips into you. Not so amusing.
On this point, I always refer back to the final twenty minutes of The Hamster Factor, the making-of doc for Gilliam's 12 Monkeys. Well worth a look, and rare for a making-of in following the film this far into the process. And —
b) we rely on word of mouth. This is something the music industry, despite all its woes, has always understood. You aim your new band at the early adopters who'll give it a listen and will tell people if they like it. In a saturated market, most of us rely on these friends - we all know who, in our circles of chums, we'll ask about what's good in the cinema or on iTunes. And we've learnt, over time, which of these people's advice works for us.
Selling box office weekend figures, using them as the basis for a corporate pissing contest, pushes these people out of the loop. And it marginalises the little pictures. By the time Early Adopter Friend has told you: "You must see that kooky little French picture xxxxx (fill in as applicable)" - it's already left the cinema.
1 comments:
Great post and great blog.
Although I agree that box office stats are over-rated, people will continue to be obsessed with a picture's performance.
The general public follows weekend B.O. performance like a Wall Street stock index for one simple reason. People like horse races and the weekend box office is just that. This isn't about quality pictures; it's about "who's winning now." B.O. stats used to be restricted to Variety and other trade publications. Now they're found in virtually every major news source around the world (at least those in countries that distribute motion pictures from the West).
To be sure, more people will buy tickets to a movie based on a horse race mentality because they "heard" the movie was good (just based on the initial B.O.). The fact that the horse race might be a fiction or, to be more charitable, of limited use as a barometer of quality picture is largely irrelevant to most of them.
Re marketing of these movies, I can think of too many exceptions here in the States of sleeper pictures with little marketing out performing pictures with bigger marketing budgets.
"The Visitor" did very well here despite the lack of marketing (and despite the non-stop marketing noise of bigger but lesser quality pictures). So too did "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" an older picture but a sleeper hit despite very little marketing on its initial theatrical release.
Producers of independent fare need to start being more creative with their marketing. With the rise of the Internet as a marketing, communication and distribution tool the playing field is starting to level out. As an example, the Internet allows any producer to initiate almost instantaneous "word of mouth" marketing of a good picture to the masses despite (the lack of) box office performance or a limited marketing budget (e.g. "Boondock Saints").
Of course, the Internet is likely a double-edged sword. If you produce a poor picture, more people will know about it that much sooner.
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