No bounce for dramas

It’s a tale as old as time, and one we’ve discussed here plenty of times before: Studio greenlights “prestige” movie, studio realizes it has little to know mass appeal, studio executes a distribution plan that only puts the movie into a couple of theaters in a handful of markets that allows only 20% of the potential audience to actually see it, studio then spends as much (or more) on ads that seek an awards nomination as they did on the initial release, studio secures nomination in the hopes it produces a box-office “bounce” that will help it recoup some of the money it cost to produce/acquire the movie.

Only this year that box-office bounce isn’t happening (Los Angeles Times, 3/3/10) for most of the movies that are up for this year’s Academy Awards. So this grand plan is hitting a bump.

Part of the problem is distribution, sure. If people aren’t living within 10 miles of a theater that’s playing An Education they can’t see it, plain and simple, so there’s not going to be any bounce there. But part of it, I think, is that Avatar is still sucking the air out of the room that every other movie was depending on. So many people are still going to see it that there’s no audience left over for the smaller movies people might try out if they are indeed able to. Here you have Hollywood basically shooting a toe of its foot, yowling in pain and figuring the best solution is just to shoot the other nine off while they’re at it. By focusing on mega-spectacles that are going to bring in repeat viewings they are fouling the water for the smaller movies they depend on for awards.

That’s why the battle between The Hurt Locker and Avatar for Best Picture at this Sunday’s Oscars is being viewed with such intensity. Will the Academy give the statue to The Hurt Locker and thus place the emphasis on what was felt by critics to be the far better movie or Avatar, which is the populist favorite – and which is therefore seen as resonating more with the home TV audience, an important metric with so much ad revenue (Adweek, 3/1/10)at stake?

If you believe the analysis coming out of Waggener Edstrom based on Twitter conversations it will be The Hurt Locker, though since such chatter is more representative of the general audience than of Academy voters the conclusions are questionable at best and hardly something I would change a money bet based on.

(Brief digression: Monitoring service Radian6 and interactive shop Deep Focus have partnered on real-time Twitter tracker for the Oscars broadcast that will be hosted on MSN.com. This is similar to something Radian6 did for last year’s MTV Video Music Awards and is pretty cool.)

There’s only so much longer Hollywood can try to have it both ways, continuing to look at tent-pole event movies that exist firmly within the audience’s comfort zone as the way to bring in lots of money, both directly and in-directly through tie-ins and merchandising, and continuing to relegate smaller, more challenging movies to second-class status until it’s time to trot them out for awards consideration. And honestly if they’re going to also hope their blockbuster movies are also going to be awards challengers then there’s little reason for them to. It’s not a great situation since studios continue to be the ones with the monetary resources that could truly champion worthwhile movies. But continuing the current situation, where they seek both critical approval and box-office success but are only willing to put money toward the latter, is not truly sustainable in the long term.

Oscar nominations will push some films out to broader audiences

The key quote in this Variety story is this line:

Quite simply, the nominations are a linchpin in selling specialty titles to the public.

Many of the movies nominated yesterday for Oscars are getting wider releases this weekend or in the next couple of weeks, something that was planned all along by their respective studios.

I really don’t have the strength to into my problems with this again…

But let me just say that this whole notion of platformed theatrical release is downright antiquated. If it didn’t cost so darn much to distribute movies, and if more people would realize that the limited space created by the number of theatrical screens was now an artificial constraint we wouldn’t be in a situation where large swaths of the audience were unable to watch Oscar-nominated movies.

Imagine if you were able to, upon seeing a TV commercial for something like Revolutionary Road, you were able to order a VOD download with the push of a button. Right now, when the hype is high.

Instead you have to find which of the five theaters in your metropolitan area it’s playing at and, if you can’t make it to them, hope it comes to a screen nearer to you.

This whole “we’ll make it and hope an Oscar nomination boosts it’s box-office” mentality just makes my head hurt. It’s so completely the opposite of every other form of mass entertainment and is a remnant of the old distribution world.

Hmmm…guess I did have the strength after all.

Reaching voters; Ignoring the public

Michael Cieply (fast becoming one of my favorite writers at the NYTimes) has two excellent stories that have been published in the last couple days.

First is his advice on how to reach potential Oscar voters who might not be in LA or NYC, where the majority of “For Your Consideration” ad buying is taking place.

Second is an examination of how many of this winter’s most-buzzed about movies aren’t – and won’t be any time soon – playing near the majority of the audience, with some of the films still only in two or three theaters nationwide until later January.

Brainstorming on improving the Oscars

There are a bunch of posts around Ye Olde Interwebs today on how the Oscars, either as a broadcast or as a ceremony as a whole can be improved in light of this year’s Lowest. Ratings. Ever. Yesterday I got an email from a contact at the L.A. Times asking for my thoughts on that same subject and the resulting story, including my quote as well as thoughts from other online folks is now up.

As is usual for me, my contribution is half snark and half actual constructive thinking and, also not unusual, focuses on increasing online engagement. Making that Oscars.com site into something that can serve as a hub of interactivity – including pulling posts from elsewhere on the web, facilitating viewer chat and allowing for embeddable video – is really the only way you’re going to get a new generation of viewers to pay attention to what’s going on. They might not watch the broadcast on TV, but I’d bet dollars to donuts they’d put their favorite song clip on their Facebook profile.

Anyway, check the story out and see what everyone had to say.

Shocker: Few people see Best Picture nominees

Oh yeah. It’s really surprising that this year’s Best Picture nominees are having trouble finding an audience. Real surprising, especially since these movies receive limited marketing support, even more limited distribution and generally are as hidden as it’s possible to make them and still consider them “released.”

1. Again, here’s the general formula:
2. Greenlight prestige project
3. Realize it has no potential to make more than $50 million.
4. Decide to bury the movie with no marketing support and a release pattern that puts it in a handful of theaters that no one can get to.
5. Act shocked when no one sees it.
6. Spend more money on ads to get it an awards nomination or win than you did on ads for the movie’s release.
7. Decry how no one is seeing your highly touted movies.

And then it’s punctuated by my smacking my head on the nearest wall.

A glut of both quality and quantity

This New York Times story by David Carr is an interesting lead-in to awards season. Carr looks at how, because Oscar voters have been rewarding smaller, more ambitious movies lately, studios are making movies they know to not be commercially viable just to put them into Oscar contention.

Couple that with this story in Variety. A panel at the American Film Market trade show said due to an influx of money there are simply more movies in theaters than the market can absorb and support. That in large part has led to the disappointing late summer and early fall box-office performance of many of these smaller films.

The thinking of the people in both stories each present their own set of marketing problems.

For risky movies that are being made because they seem to have the potential for Oscar wins, you have the problem of those movies not fitting into traditional marketing silos. There are complex stories that don’t have a character uttering that one perfect catchphrase that the studio can include in the campaign. There aren’t showy visuals that translate well to 30-second TV spots during Grey’s Anatomy.

Based on early reviews, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood may be the epitome this season of this problem. While critics love it, it’s going to fall outside the comfort zone, it seems, of a good amount of the movie-going public.

So the studio doesn’t know how to market it and feels the audience is limited because it’s of a more rarified quality. That results in limited distribution, which keeps people who might live far from the few theaters playing the movie from seeing it. Read this post on the Chicago Mom’s Blog about one woman’s quest to see Once for an illustration of how real that problem is. She wanted to see the movie but couldn’t because it wasn’t available in her area.

This results in low box office. Which means the studio is then hoping for an Oscar win to boost the anemic revenue. That, as I’ve stated before, means a “For Your Consideration” campaign that likely equals or eclipses that which supported the movie’s release.

Now put that together with studios of all shapes and sizes – from small independents to specialty arms of larger studios – releasing a tremendous quantity of such films. People don’t have unlimited time to see all these movies. So they make choices. This person chooses that movie, another person chooses another. They split the available dollars in the market to the point where no one wins.

The solution, of course, is a combination of new distribution models coupled with better audience targeting. If the right people don’t know about the movie and know why it would be a good expenditure of their limited time and money the movie will flop. If those people then can’t actually view the movie in a timely and convenient way the movie will flop. It’s not hard.

E-commerce has thrived because of the combination of search, product availability and ease of transaction. But movies haven’t grasped this yet. Yes, you can buy tickets online, but if the movie you want to see isn’t playing in your area that’s useless. The distribution and availability have to be there in order to complete the online picture for the motion picture industry.

Once this happens two things will happen: First, the cost of production will drop because big films will have to compete with smaller movies based on price points, much like other consumer products do now. Second, the marketing will improve because each film will absolutely have to reach the intended audience in order to survive.

But the exposure smaller films will get will be worth it for everyone since it is a major shift on all levels. That even includes the network airing the Oscar ceremony each year. More people being able to view the nominated films means more public interest means a bigger TV audience means higher advertising rates.

The transition to a new business model, though, will be painful for many of those involved. Fighting through it and emerging on the other side will lead to a new world for business and audience. Everyone needs to be driving toward that goal.

Indie films finding success hard to come by this fall

Both Variety and the Los Angeles Times have stories in the last couple days about the difficult environment smaller, independent and non-mainstream films are finding themselves in this fall.

As the VAR story says, smaller movies that don’t have the huge marketing resources of a big-budget blockbuster rely largely on the festivals earlier in the year to build a core group of fans. Those first adopters (that’s what they are) hopefully then can ignite a larger audience when the movie is released later in the fall and early winter. A strong presence in the last quarter of the year will, in turn, hopefully result in an awards nomination in the first quarter of the next year.

Again, because of the lack of marketing budget, an awards nomination is huge for these movies because it can be the only time it receives any real non-niche audience attention. These movies do a good portion of their box-office between the nomination announcements and the award presentation, with it dropping off drastically after the Oscar ceremony.

But the MPAA, in its infinite wisdom, has chopped a month off of that nomination to ceremony period. So the movies that rely on that post-nomination bump aren’t able to develop quite as big a bump.

The situation is complicated, as the LAT story explains, by the fact that there’s a glut of quality smaller films in theaters right now. So many that audiences aren’t able to see all the movies they want to see, leading to an overall weak box-office period for these movies.

Contributing to the problem is the fact that these movies aren’t generally spread over the year because of the awards calendar and the traditional advantage to late year releases. Poor box office then leads to movies being squeezed out of multiplexes as exhibitors turn over the screens to something that may bring in more money.

Of course there’s the problem some films are going to be facing, where the stars received critical praise for their performance but the movie still tanked. As a second Variety story says, it can be hard for movies that didn’t perform up to expectations to garner nominations in the first place.

I really think this all goes back an idea that is best expressed in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. Right now resources for distribution – movie screens – are scarce. Like store shelves, the people running theaters need to squeeze the maximum revenue from each one of those screens. Each film needs to earn its keep and if it’s not doing that there isn’t the patience to see if that changes. A new movie is swapped in and the odds are played once again to see if this one sticks with audiences.

That system means only the most popular items will ever be available for any length of time. If you wanted to see Michael Clayton but weren’t available for the one or two weeks it was playing locally then you were screwed because it probably got pulled shortly thereafter.

The system is best remedied through online distribution. Netflix has more movies than your local Blockbuster store because doing business virtually means they can devote more resources to inventory. Extrapolating that to actual downloads, the ability to store an even larger number of movies for on-demand delivery increases greatly.

The smaller studios who are finding themselves squeezed by the big movies, who they just can’t compete with, should be at the front of the line to try a new system like this.

Quote of the Day

While Mark Caro is talking about the Short Film category I think the larger point is applicable to the movies that play downtown and not where people actually, you know, live.

At some point you have to consider the entertainment value of seeing films you’ve never heard of winning awards you don’t care about so people you’ve never heard of can go up on stage and thank more people you’ve never heard of…

[Via fellow Tribber Eric Zorn]

Oscar win = revenue

There are a couple points in this story about how Oscar wins translate to increased revenue I want to take issue with. See the quotes followed by my thoughts.

• “Last year’s winner, Lionsgate’s “Crash” — a May release that hit the video shelves the previous September — suggested that a new pattern had arrived.”: This isn’t the first sign of a new paradigm emerging, it means that a quality movie was released earlier in the year and that theater-to-home video windows are shrinking. There’s a difference
• “As far as the theatrical life of this year’s best picture contenders went, being nominated wasn’t just an honor but also an opportunity for some of the smaller films to raise their box office profile.”: Because, as we all know, you never want to actually let people see quality films until they’ve won an award. Asshats.

Effective distribution (not the current model but something that lets people choose when, where and how they get to see a film) combined with effective marketing (something that continues to support a film even after its opening weekend or month) combined with post-filter recommendations that let people see what other films are “like” a film they’ve already enjoyed can have the effect of flattening out the release of high-quality movies over the entire course of the year. They won’t have to be all lumped into the last two months of the year.

And speaking of Oscar, I was wrong the other day when I estimated that Warner Bros. spent $25 million on convincing voters to go for The Departed. Turns out the campaign was fairly subdued. I know I saw a number of online “For Your Consideration” ads but I guess they didn’t go all out like other studios (cough/ paramount /cough) did for their flicks.

Quick Takes: 2/26/07

• Social media and its allures are tempting people away from movies, movies that are increasingly losing their ability to speak to where the culture and society are at the moment. Robert Young at GigaOm and Steve Bryant at ReelPop each have their own thoughts on this as well.
• Steve also says that the behind-the-scenes footage on Oscar.com would have been more useful to the Academy if they had been embeddable, allowing bloggers to pass along their favorite moments and getting free impressions for the Oscars.
• Video game playing is becoming a mass social experience, taking place in movie theater type palaces. Imagine if movies were this good at attracting people.
• Tim Nudd makes a good point about the opening of last night’s Oscar ceremony, a broadcast I did not watch due to extreme lack of caring.
• Mario comments on the Apple iPhone ad that debuted during the telecast and the references to social media tools that were littered throughout the ceremony.
• While it’s great that so many theaters across the country ran marathons of the five Best Picture nominees, it should be noted that in many instances this was as close as many audience members got to the flicks, some of which had distribution that limited who could see them and when.
• Angela at AdRants covers the really, really wrong-headed Number 23 “would-be viral.”
• The iMediaConnection panel reviews the online efforts for Black Snake Moan.