It seems like even before the first weekend is over, all the box office analysts have already declared the success or failure of the movie. I know personally, I don’t see a movie until the end of the run, so I don’t have to deal with huge crowds and lines and bad seats, it’s safe to say that nearly everyone I know follows suit. Doesn’t the entire run – including theater receipts, pay per view, home media sales, etc. – have to be considered for that hit or flop call is made? If not, why?
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A lot of, if not most, ‘event-based’ things in life don’t have a very long tail. What does this mean? Well, if you are trying to make people interact with something you made (a movie, a video-game, an e-mail, a questionnaire,…) and that comes out in a market that regularly renews itself (there’s new movies in theatres every week, new video-games, there’s so many e-mails and questionnaires all the time,…), you will get the majority of your interactions in the first 24-72 hours, after which it trails off. Back when I was a student we were taught that 80-90% of our clicks/reads on e-mail marketing would happen in the first 24 hours, and after that we’d see it trickle in for a few more days.
The same thing happens with a movie, but it’s even more accentuated because of how a theatre will plan its rooms! Say you’ve got a big superhero movie you’ll launch in a few years, so you start telling everyone about it, and there’s a nice buzz going. Theatres will start tentatively planning to have 4 of their 10 rooms for that movie when it launches. But then, OH NO, the star of the movie turns out to be rather insane, and the preview viewings are having pretty mid-reactions. Pre-sale tickets are also not going so smoothly, so the theatre will scale back to 3 out of 10 rooms, maybe people will just show up on the day of the launch. On the day of the launch, nope, every room is only filled for 1/3 of capacity. After a few days they see that even less people show up, so they only use one more room to show this movie, and it’s never full to capacity. It’s better for the movie theatre to schedule in other movies that sell more tickets.
The studio, the marketing people, the reviewers all see these numbers, and know that the largest amount of people has already gone to see the movie. They have seen this happen hundreds and thousand of times before, and 99.99% of the times they know what this will lead to: very low ticket sales, no chance to get out of this death spiral, no way of recuperating the costs of making the movie. Like a flash in a pan, all the money is gone.
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