Last week, Bloody-Disgusting.com announced a partnership with AMC to debut at least one new horror film per month. A few days before that, AMC and Regal formally announced the formation of a distribution company, "Open Road Films", that would acquire and distribute roughly eight to ten independently-produced but mainstream-friendly movies per year. Dating back to last October, AMC has a relationship with China Lion Films to open roughly one Chinese film per month the same day it opens in China.
Meanwhile, AMC is also replacing its loyalty program, which previously offered awards every five films seen, with one that offers $10 back on every $100, including money spent at the concession stand, while also offering other benefits. In most markets, this change kicks in at the end of the month. These two sets of developments are likely unrelated, although I do find it somewhat interesting that the theater chain I go to most often (they have 24 of the 67 screens in metro Boston) is making this shift while at the same time investing heavily in independent films.
Most large theater chains have loyalty programs now - visit the theater so many times, or spend so much money, and get a free ticket, popcorn, or soda (or, as is the case with AMC's new program, flat cash value). Their presumed main function is right there in the name - by offering better perks, you'll go to their theater rather than another when the choice is there. The new program is potentially a less rewarding one, value wise, especially if you don't spend a lot at the concession stand - $10 for every $100 is an easy 10% to figure out, whereas the previous program would alternate between soda, popcorn, and tickets every five tickets. Figure a soda is $4, a popcorn is $5, and a ticket is $9, and the average reward is $6 per $45 spent, or a bit over 13%. Of course, if you are spending as much at the concession stand as tickets, you were only getting 6.5%. Considering that these awards expire, that's not necessarily a bad payout for getting the audience to see a movie at your theater rather than the one down the road (or, as I've seen in Manhattan, directly across the street).
However, I suspect that in many cases this may actually be a secondary purpose, especially now that nearly every chain has a rewards program. After all, if you've got a card for every theater in your wallet, and they all pay out at roughly the same rate, you'll still get bonuses at the same clip, just spread among theaters. So I suspect that AMC expanding their program to include concessions may indicate that these offers serve another valuable function: They can be market research goldmines.
Now, admittedly, this may just be a case of my work history giving me a skewed perspective - as a student, I worked in a theater and saw first-hand what a crazy profit margin soda and candy has there, and my day job in the present is taking information that has been generated for one purpose and reporting on it for someone else entirely. But let's face it - while you only have to give out some basic-but-useful information when you sign up for one of these programs (age, sex, address), you're almost inevitably asked to complete a survey that nets the chain much more (income, race, marital status, preferred genres, etc.).
There is tremendously useful information to be mined from this, especially for a large chain that has other ways of gathering data. If they find that a certain type of movies attracts high-income customers, that's useful (especially when they're selling advertising time before the show). If they find out that, say, the Bloody-Disgusting series is regularly drawing people with ZIP codes 40 miles west to Boston, they might consider expanding it to Worcester. Combine the two, and you can find spots on the map that are ripe for expansion. Heck, you can compare the movies people say they're anticipating in your survey with their actual buying habits to adjust the tracking information you purchase from other sources.
From the theater's perspective, though, probably the most important information doesn't have much to do with demographics: It's which movies translate into the most popcorn sales. After all, that $10 ticket doesn't do a whole lot for the theater. They may keep one dollar's worth the first week (with the other nine going to the studio) and though the split becomes more favorable to the theater as weeks go by, only the really big hits stick around for much more than a month or so; the studios have gotten very good at front-loading a movie's box office. But the popcorn and soda are almost pure profit; the small $5 popcorn is, what, a dime's worth of corn in a bag that costs five cents? That's where they make their money, and when you present your rewards card at both the box office and concession stand, it takes a half-decent database guy something like five lines of SQL to figure out which movies are doing the sort of business that really matters.
By and large, there probably won't be a whole lot of variance, but the outliers might turn out to be spots where a theater or chain can really help themselves. For instance, kids' movies sell cheaper tickets, but if you sell $2 more per person in snacks for tickets where you keep twenty cents less per capita, you're doing all right. If you're finding that people in Harvard Square buy 30% less in snacks when seeing action-adventure movies than people at Boston Common, you know where to open your next action movie. And while the numbers likely aren't quite that definitive, every little bit counts, especially when the studios are squeezing the exhibitors in every way they can.
Which brings us back to the start, with AMC and Regal forming a distributor and picking up more independents besides. I'm going to go out on a limb, but I'm going to guess that China Lion does not get the same sort of deal Paramount gets; they need the theaters much more than the theaters need them, rather than vice versa. And while the theater gets to keep more of the box office for those films, there's a good chance that the concession money fluctuates more (what with the relatively small sample size) and is more important: At the end of the year, if the "Bloody-Disgusting Presents" movies and Chinese movies are doing about the same ticket sales, but one is selling more popcorn, I strongly suspect the latter is more likely to have their relationship with the chain continue.
One thing I am very curious about is how much effect all this gathered information will have on Open Road. Specifically, if Open Road's acquisitions guys have a number of movies they're looking at, will questions of which one (based upon similar movies in AMC/Regal's ever-expanding database) is more likely to sell the most popcorn be more important than, say, which one is likely to have a long life on DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming?
Heck, just given the company's ownership, will they act in odd ways, like setting an unusually low split? Which is better for AMC and Regal - if they were to go nuts and set a 50% split, the chain that sells each ticket ultimately gets 75% minus overhead, a far cry from the 10% they get now. Will these movies have an unusually long window between theatrical release and home viewing options? Will the theaters be able to use individual acquisitions as leverage against mid-range studio films?
This is probably more interesting to me than it really should be, as I don't own a theater, and I suspect that there's a fair amount of people reading this somewhat horrified at the very idea of there being a big database somewhere that tracks not just your moviegoing history, but what snacks you bought for which movie. Heck, as much as I don't really feel that I can object to this without being a hypocrite, the notion that ultimately the movies available for me to see will not be chosen on great direction, or even projected box office, but the likelihood that the people going will buy the large soda rather than the small is a little bit worrisome.
This is a business, though, and the more information a business has, the better decisions it can make, and the less likely we'll be seeing theaters close down. And if getting this sort of granular data means that chain theaters start to find that the screen they've got showing foreign and independent films is deceptively profitable, we all benefit.
And, hey, now that we've got the whole thing laid out here, maybe we can use it to our advantage. Certainly, from now on, I'll only be purchasing a popcorn and soda at movies where I'm really enthusiastic, or which are part of a series I'd like to support. The flicks I'm just seeing because I'm bored that afternoon and they looked okay, I can wait until later.
Showing posts with label Ideas for Theaters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ideas for Theaters. Show all posts
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Monday, November 01, 2010
Aftershock, and mainstream-foreign distribution
A few weeks ago, I went to a screening of Endhiran that was packed even though it was not even the movie's opening weekend and wondered what the heck Indian films have that other foreign and independent films don't. The answer, I figure, is a combination of day-and-date releases and local marketing. It probably also doesn't hurt that they have been a staple of whatever theater they were running in at any given point over the past few years: If you've wanted to see an Indian movie in the Greater Boston area, there's been one playing.
Still, I figured Aftershock might have a chance to do pretty well. The Boston Common theater where it is playing is very close to Chinatown. The movie was a big hit in China this summer, had the look of an epic that needs to be seen on the big screen, and as it had only played there a few months ago, I figured it might not have been completely undercut by large chunks of its audience already having the movie on DVD. Heck, I saw larger-than-expected crowds at Formosa Betrayed and 71: Into the Fire, and figured it had a pretty good shot of doing well. I planned to write something about the irony that the big chain theater could open this movie up while the independent cinema a block away apparently can't.
Instead, I sat down to the 1:45pm show with only four other people, I think only one or two looking Asian. Part, I suspect, is that I was wrong about those DVDs: They apparently have some amazingly short release dates in China; though IMDB shows the movie as having been released on 22 July 2010 in both the PRC and Hong Kong, YesAsia shows 17 September 2010 releases for the DVD and Blu-ray in Hong Kong, 30 September for the DVD in China, and 15 October release for the Blu-ray in China (and the Hong Kong VCD, yes, really, VCD). So, even with an unusually aggressive American release, Aftershock was still competing with import DVDs, and Chinese DVDs are as cheap as they have to be to compete with ubiquitous piracy. (Apparently Blu-ray piracy is still lagging, as those retail for about twice as much as DVDs in China, as opposed to the 15-30% markup in the U.S.)
But I also have to wonder how well-supported the release was. Was there signage in Chinatown businesses, or ad buys on websites frequented by the target audience? I've got no idea. What I do wonder is if bigger audiences would result if AMC (or the Stuart Street Playhouse) made Chinese films a regular thing. Even if you can't get day-and-date releases, just try having something there for a couple months during a down period (September/October or February/March, maybe) or have it be a regular weekday series.
Fresh movies would likely help, but I suspect it would be hard for any local exhibitor (except maybe Austin's Tim League) to convince Asian studios to do so. After all, intuitively, the collapse of Asian films in the U.S. home video market over the past five or ten years does not seem to argue for a more aggressive, expensive courting of that market, no matter how successful Indian films have been using the same model. But I suspect Bollywood is ahead of the curve, albeit accidentally - they didn't so much anticipate a world where the internet allows fans around the world to follow foreign movie industries as closely as the local one, or where region-free DVD players allowed hardcore fans to bypass licensing agreements that don't get struck for every title (and where the ones they are struck for take forever to come out and may show up in edited form); they just saw an audience not being served and went after it in the most straightforward way possible.
Now, I suspect that it's time for everyone else to see that this is the best model - rather than waiting to strike deals with Magnolia and IFC after the buzz on your property has peaked, market directly to American fans, including day-and-date releases in theaters in or near large Chinese-American communities (this applies equally-well to Korea, Japan, heck, even France). Delays give audiences time to focus on something else, and while profits may down on the big movies, I suspect that the mid-range films will make up for it.
Also, I suspect that if foreign studios offer favorable terms to the AMCs and Landmarks of the world, there's a good chance that they'll be able to get their movies in front of audiences that might not otherwise see them. Right now, the chance of the average guy who likes movies finding these works is low - they don't show up in multiplexes, Best Buy is cutting shelving, video rental stores are imploding, Redbox doesn't stock niche, and Amazon and Netflix isn't likely to show you these movies unless you're already browsing something similar. Ironically, theatrical might be the easiest for foreign studios looking to increase their presence in the U.S. to crack, especially if they're smart about how they go about it. It will take a serious and sustained effort, though - getting the base there will require doing more than putting one movie out a month after the DVD is available.
It's also worth remembering that this will take time, because there are a few different audiences that would hopefully come in order. First, the immigrants and the hardcore fans (the guys a few notches above me) - the people who follow the Chinese film industries as closely as Hollywood if not closer. These people can potentially form a solid, predictable base if courted well (for Bollywood films, they appear to be all you need). After that, you get the adventurous movie fans - the guys who come to the multiplex and maybe will drop nine bucks on the film with a cool name and cool poster that starts in ten minutes. Having the occasional 3-D movie wouldn't hurt (and as a bonus, that's cheaper than shipping film). Then, maybe, that group will start recommending the foreign-but-mainstream movie to his or her friends, especially after he or she has seen a few that impress.
This would take time, though, and probably an unusual run of good movies. Would any theater be willing to take this chance? It seems like it could be high-risk, except for theaters with 20+ screens that are willing to take a chance on what they show on the smaller ones and places like Fresh Pond that are likely running close to the edge anyway. But with foreign film distribution falling apart in the US, it's possible that being bold is better than trying to shore up the current system.
Aftershock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)
It's not hard to get the wrong impression of Aftershock; the poster in the theater lobby notes that it was released in IMAX (interestingly, though showing the North American release date, the text on that one-sheet is almost entirely Chinese), and while director Feng Xiaogang has directed a wide range of films in all genres, it has been his grand spectacles such as Assembly and The Banquet (aka Legend of the Black Scorpion) that have gotten the most attention overseas. So it may be a bit surprising when, with roughly a half hour down and nearly two to go, the film shifts gears to become a family melodrama, and stays one to the end. Fortunately, it's a pretty good one as such things go.
The film starts in Tangshan on 26 July 1976, where we meet Fang Qiang (Zhang Guoqiang) and his wife Yuan Li (Fan Xu), as well as their twin children, Fang Da and Fang Deng. Sadly, early the next morning the date and place of perhaps the most devastating earthquakes of the twentieth century: Roughly a quarter of the of this city's million inhabitants died when it struck as they slept. As the city crumbles around her, she is faced with an impossible choice - a piece of rubble rests on both her children; lift it from Da and Deng will be crushed, lift it from Deng and Da dies. Ultimately, she says "save my son". Fortunately, the men working to dig the children out are neither engineers nor doctors, and Deng lives. The silent child is adopted by two of the soldiers (Chen Daoming and Chen Jin). We next catch up with them about ten years later, when Fang Da (Chen Li), who lost an arm in the quake, is chafing at his mother's obsessive attention, while sister Wang Deng (Zhang Jingchu) is making plans to apply to medical school, though her nightmares indicate that she remembers much more about the night of the quake than she's let on.
All the characters are deeply affected by that night, and it's something we will watch them deal with practically to the present day; the English-language title turns out to be quite descriptive. This is a film not about a disaster or even just its immediate aftermath, but how a single event can affect a person profoundly. The script by Su Xiaowei spans thirty-two years and does a remarkable job of keeping the focus on its main characters even though there are ample opportunities to go off on tangents or have the main cast grow to an unwieldy size; supporting characters are rotated in and out naturally. There are some odd pacing issues, though, almost as though Feng and Su felt they had plenty of time in the beginning but pressure to wrap it up toward the end: There's a lengthy sequence with Qiang's mother and sister, for instance, that ultimately doesn't change anything, although this may be a sequence the film's main audience expects to see. At the other end of the movie, certain major emotional moments happen just off-screen. They are not bad choices; the restraint actually works very well. It's odd, though, in that there are times that restraint is not the word one would use to describe Feng's work here.
Full review at EFC.
Still, I figured Aftershock might have a chance to do pretty well. The Boston Common theater where it is playing is very close to Chinatown. The movie was a big hit in China this summer, had the look of an epic that needs to be seen on the big screen, and as it had only played there a few months ago, I figured it might not have been completely undercut by large chunks of its audience already having the movie on DVD. Heck, I saw larger-than-expected crowds at Formosa Betrayed and 71: Into the Fire, and figured it had a pretty good shot of doing well. I planned to write something about the irony that the big chain theater could open this movie up while the independent cinema a block away apparently can't.
Instead, I sat down to the 1:45pm show with only four other people, I think only one or two looking Asian. Part, I suspect, is that I was wrong about those DVDs: They apparently have some amazingly short release dates in China; though IMDB shows the movie as having been released on 22 July 2010 in both the PRC and Hong Kong, YesAsia shows 17 September 2010 releases for the DVD and Blu-ray in Hong Kong, 30 September for the DVD in China, and 15 October release for the Blu-ray in China (and the Hong Kong VCD, yes, really, VCD). So, even with an unusually aggressive American release, Aftershock was still competing with import DVDs, and Chinese DVDs are as cheap as they have to be to compete with ubiquitous piracy. (Apparently Blu-ray piracy is still lagging, as those retail for about twice as much as DVDs in China, as opposed to the 15-30% markup in the U.S.)
But I also have to wonder how well-supported the release was. Was there signage in Chinatown businesses, or ad buys on websites frequented by the target audience? I've got no idea. What I do wonder is if bigger audiences would result if AMC (or the Stuart Street Playhouse) made Chinese films a regular thing. Even if you can't get day-and-date releases, just try having something there for a couple months during a down period (September/October or February/March, maybe) or have it be a regular weekday series.
Fresh movies would likely help, but I suspect it would be hard for any local exhibitor (except maybe Austin's Tim League) to convince Asian studios to do so. After all, intuitively, the collapse of Asian films in the U.S. home video market over the past five or ten years does not seem to argue for a more aggressive, expensive courting of that market, no matter how successful Indian films have been using the same model. But I suspect Bollywood is ahead of the curve, albeit accidentally - they didn't so much anticipate a world where the internet allows fans around the world to follow foreign movie industries as closely as the local one, or where region-free DVD players allowed hardcore fans to bypass licensing agreements that don't get struck for every title (and where the ones they are struck for take forever to come out and may show up in edited form); they just saw an audience not being served and went after it in the most straightforward way possible.
Now, I suspect that it's time for everyone else to see that this is the best model - rather than waiting to strike deals with Magnolia and IFC after the buzz on your property has peaked, market directly to American fans, including day-and-date releases in theaters in or near large Chinese-American communities (this applies equally-well to Korea, Japan, heck, even France). Delays give audiences time to focus on something else, and while profits may down on the big movies, I suspect that the mid-range films will make up for it.
Also, I suspect that if foreign studios offer favorable terms to the AMCs and Landmarks of the world, there's a good chance that they'll be able to get their movies in front of audiences that might not otherwise see them. Right now, the chance of the average guy who likes movies finding these works is low - they don't show up in multiplexes, Best Buy is cutting shelving, video rental stores are imploding, Redbox doesn't stock niche, and Amazon and Netflix isn't likely to show you these movies unless you're already browsing something similar. Ironically, theatrical might be the easiest for foreign studios looking to increase their presence in the U.S. to crack, especially if they're smart about how they go about it. It will take a serious and sustained effort, though - getting the base there will require doing more than putting one movie out a month after the DVD is available.
It's also worth remembering that this will take time, because there are a few different audiences that would hopefully come in order. First, the immigrants and the hardcore fans (the guys a few notches above me) - the people who follow the Chinese film industries as closely as Hollywood if not closer. These people can potentially form a solid, predictable base if courted well (for Bollywood films, they appear to be all you need). After that, you get the adventurous movie fans - the guys who come to the multiplex and maybe will drop nine bucks on the film with a cool name and cool poster that starts in ten minutes. Having the occasional 3-D movie wouldn't hurt (and as a bonus, that's cheaper than shipping film). Then, maybe, that group will start recommending the foreign-but-mainstream movie to his or her friends, especially after he or she has seen a few that impress.
This would take time, though, and probably an unusual run of good movies. Would any theater be willing to take this chance? It seems like it could be high-risk, except for theaters with 20+ screens that are willing to take a chance on what they show on the smaller ones and places like Fresh Pond that are likely running close to the edge anyway. But with foreign film distribution falling apart in the US, it's possible that being bold is better than trying to shore up the current system.
Aftershock
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 October 2010 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)
It's not hard to get the wrong impression of Aftershock; the poster in the theater lobby notes that it was released in IMAX (interestingly, though showing the North American release date, the text on that one-sheet is almost entirely Chinese), and while director Feng Xiaogang has directed a wide range of films in all genres, it has been his grand spectacles such as Assembly and The Banquet (aka Legend of the Black Scorpion) that have gotten the most attention overseas. So it may be a bit surprising when, with roughly a half hour down and nearly two to go, the film shifts gears to become a family melodrama, and stays one to the end. Fortunately, it's a pretty good one as such things go.
The film starts in Tangshan on 26 July 1976, where we meet Fang Qiang (Zhang Guoqiang) and his wife Yuan Li (Fan Xu), as well as their twin children, Fang Da and Fang Deng. Sadly, early the next morning the date and place of perhaps the most devastating earthquakes of the twentieth century: Roughly a quarter of the of this city's million inhabitants died when it struck as they slept. As the city crumbles around her, she is faced with an impossible choice - a piece of rubble rests on both her children; lift it from Da and Deng will be crushed, lift it from Deng and Da dies. Ultimately, she says "save my son". Fortunately, the men working to dig the children out are neither engineers nor doctors, and Deng lives. The silent child is adopted by two of the soldiers (Chen Daoming and Chen Jin). We next catch up with them about ten years later, when Fang Da (Chen Li), who lost an arm in the quake, is chafing at his mother's obsessive attention, while sister Wang Deng (Zhang Jingchu) is making plans to apply to medical school, though her nightmares indicate that she remembers much more about the night of the quake than she's let on.
All the characters are deeply affected by that night, and it's something we will watch them deal with practically to the present day; the English-language title turns out to be quite descriptive. This is a film not about a disaster or even just its immediate aftermath, but how a single event can affect a person profoundly. The script by Su Xiaowei spans thirty-two years and does a remarkable job of keeping the focus on its main characters even though there are ample opportunities to go off on tangents or have the main cast grow to an unwieldy size; supporting characters are rotated in and out naturally. There are some odd pacing issues, though, almost as though Feng and Su felt they had plenty of time in the beginning but pressure to wrap it up toward the end: There's a lengthy sequence with Qiang's mother and sister, for instance, that ultimately doesn't change anything, although this may be a sequence the film's main audience expects to see. At the other end of the movie, certain major emotional moments happen just off-screen. They are not bad choices; the restraint actually works very well. It's odd, though, in that there are times that restraint is not the word one would use to describe Feng's work here.
Full review at EFC.
Monday, October 05, 2009
Ideas for theaters: The Multiplex Double Feature
So, my scans and write-ups for This Week In Tickets are stuck on an SD card, and my card reader crapped out today. I apparently have terrible luck with those; I've got a flash drive that died in a similar way, a couple MP3 players that just fritzed out, etc. It's like I've inherited my mother's ability to kill digital watches by wearing them, except it applies to small storage devices with USB ports.
What really annoys me is that I like this card reader - my last one got beat up and this was nicely compact. I guess this teaches me about being cheap.
One of the things stuck there is a half-written piece from March about what Austin's Alamo Drafthouse gets right that so many other theaters get wrong. Not that I think theaters should follow the Alamo's model (although give me a couple million or so to renovate either the empty Polaroid building in Cambridge's Central Square or the Circle Cinema in Brookline...), but I'm interested in things that might get more people in theaters.
So, I was reading this on Cinematical, and although the idea of encouraging theater-hopping is fabulously wrong-headed, it does give me another idea: Double feature pricing.
When I worked at theaters, the big thing management tried to have us do was up-selling. You know - someone asks for a small soda, and a medium is only a quarter more. So, why not take that to the box office - you buy a ticket for one show, a second is just two dollars more? There would be some restrictions, of course - I figure the second movie would have to be a non-new release so that the studio doesn't freak out about pricing. The double feature would have to be done in one purchase, so that you don't have people selling their ticket stub outside for a couple bucks. And maybe you have a time limit on how long can pass between the end of the first show and the start of the second. The idea is that the guy buying the ticket is in the theater for four or five hours instead of two, and thus more likely to spend money on popcorn, soda, hot dogs, pizza, etc.
Clearly, this would benefit the theaters. It wouldn't be a huge win for distributors, and they'd probably need a lot of convincing, considering how the entertainment industry usually thinks. After all, they tend to look at piracy as their losing the full value of a sale, rather than acknowledging that not every pirate would have paid full price and that the money lost from someone who would otherwise purchase is potentially made up for in people sampling and buying copies and merchandise. Here, they would need to be convinced that they are not losing their share of the difference in price between a "second feature" ticket and a regular ticket, but gaining their share of a ticket that would never have been purchased if not for the low price, and gaining a more likely DVD/Blu-ray sale down the line because the person buying the ticket decides he likes this movie that he otherwise wouldn't have seen.
Heck, the smaller distributors (or the boutique arms of larger ones) might find a way to make their niche as B-movies in the original use of the term work: Offer a discount if paired with another feature by the same studio, or waive the 10-day rule if you figure that doing so will multiply the number of people who see the movie. If you're making the same number of prints, you might be better off getting 10 people to pay $2 each than 2 to pay $10 a pop - it's that many more people who will be looking for it when it comes out on video, for one, and it may actually get theaters to program those movies, giving them the cachet of a theatrical run rather than being seen as just direct-to-video.
And I'll readily admit, the part I like most of all is people seeing movies that may be a little outside their usual fare, but why not do it for $2? Maybe they'll realize that it's not just action movies that benefit from being seen on the big screen, or they'll take their chances on that foreign-language, documentary, or independent film that they might not have tried otherwise.
There may be a whole bunch of reasons why this wouldn't work, contractually or structurally. Still, I think it would be a great way to add value to the theatrical experience without adding a ton of overhead, and exhibitors can only benefit by having people see the movies as potentially a really good deal.
What really annoys me is that I like this card reader - my last one got beat up and this was nicely compact. I guess this teaches me about being cheap.
One of the things stuck there is a half-written piece from March about what Austin's Alamo Drafthouse gets right that so many other theaters get wrong. Not that I think theaters should follow the Alamo's model (although give me a couple million or so to renovate either the empty Polaroid building in Cambridge's Central Square or the Circle Cinema in Brookline...), but I'm interested in things that might get more people in theaters.
So, I was reading this on Cinematical, and although the idea of encouraging theater-hopping is fabulously wrong-headed, it does give me another idea: Double feature pricing.
When I worked at theaters, the big thing management tried to have us do was up-selling. You know - someone asks for a small soda, and a medium is only a quarter more. So, why not take that to the box office - you buy a ticket for one show, a second is just two dollars more? There would be some restrictions, of course - I figure the second movie would have to be a non-new release so that the studio doesn't freak out about pricing. The double feature would have to be done in one purchase, so that you don't have people selling their ticket stub outside for a couple bucks. And maybe you have a time limit on how long can pass between the end of the first show and the start of the second. The idea is that the guy buying the ticket is in the theater for four or five hours instead of two, and thus more likely to spend money on popcorn, soda, hot dogs, pizza, etc.
Clearly, this would benefit the theaters. It wouldn't be a huge win for distributors, and they'd probably need a lot of convincing, considering how the entertainment industry usually thinks. After all, they tend to look at piracy as their losing the full value of a sale, rather than acknowledging that not every pirate would have paid full price and that the money lost from someone who would otherwise purchase is potentially made up for in people sampling and buying copies and merchandise. Here, they would need to be convinced that they are not losing their share of the difference in price between a "second feature" ticket and a regular ticket, but gaining their share of a ticket that would never have been purchased if not for the low price, and gaining a more likely DVD/Blu-ray sale down the line because the person buying the ticket decides he likes this movie that he otherwise wouldn't have seen.
Heck, the smaller distributors (or the boutique arms of larger ones) might find a way to make their niche as B-movies in the original use of the term work: Offer a discount if paired with another feature by the same studio, or waive the 10-day rule if you figure that doing so will multiply the number of people who see the movie. If you're making the same number of prints, you might be better off getting 10 people to pay $2 each than 2 to pay $10 a pop - it's that many more people who will be looking for it when it comes out on video, for one, and it may actually get theaters to program those movies, giving them the cachet of a theatrical run rather than being seen as just direct-to-video.
And I'll readily admit, the part I like most of all is people seeing movies that may be a little outside their usual fare, but why not do it for $2? Maybe they'll realize that it's not just action movies that benefit from being seen on the big screen, or they'll take their chances on that foreign-language, documentary, or independent film that they might not have tried otherwise.
There may be a whole bunch of reasons why this wouldn't work, contractually or structurally. Still, I think it would be a great way to add value to the theatrical experience without adding a ton of overhead, and exhibitors can only benefit by having people see the movies as potentially a really good deal.
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