Home Films/DVD Asylum

Movies from comedy to drama to your favorite Hollyweird Star.

Yes, no and yes............

or something like that.

We have a film department in LA that schmoozes with Hollywood and they, at times, get to screen the movies first. Not always, but I would imagine a good portion of films are being seen by somebody in that department. Predictions are made and our guys/gals are pretty damn good. You might have 10 movies one week with a predicted gross of 63 million and on Friday night, when the preliminary box office take gets sent out to individual theatres (for adjustments,) we'd be within a few mil.. One slice of the pie might be slightly bigger/smaller, but the pie would look like a full pie.

Since we get our bookings Monday/Tuesday, we need some idea on how to place that particular film. I had four theatres with 315 seats, then one with 186 and five with 177. The other six were smaller. Knowing how a film is going to play at any given theatre will help save having to move it (and others) during Friday night's shows.

My last two theatres catered to mostly black audiences, so I grossed quite well with pictures like Rush Hour Two, Nutty Professor and Big Mamma's House. Naturally, the film dept. would load me up.

Generally, a film company will have "X" amount of prints to divey up over the entire country. AMC might get 250 prints to spread out over its 180 theatres, Regal gets theirs, GCC their share and so on. Our film dept. will then place the films across our territory in hopes of getting the most money. Obvioulsy, the MegaPlexes are getting 3, 4, and 5 prints, so the multis will get less. I got three prints as a max, of a popular film. I got two of Pearl Harbor, but three of Lord of The Rings. I can always sync. my larger houses, so with one print, I can play two theatres at the same time. We have triple synced before, but the potential for a brain wrap is quite high and then you have a lot of pissed off customers. The best thing to do in this case is just sell it out.

The one bummer for theatres is that there's an exclusionary rule of like 3 miles. So if you and I have our theatres two miles apart, Star Wars II is probably only going to be given to one of us, with the next Fox film going to the loser. Nice theatres want to play day and date, so the customer will choose the better theatre to give her money to. Now, as it stands, that customer has to possibly drive by the better theatre, to see the film across town in a theatre that they might not prefer.

As for your wondering about 'buying films blind,' this might have been so in the distant past, but not recently.

Chris


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  • Yes, no and yes............ - Chris Garrett 08:56:55 04/19/02 (1)


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