1965 was an transformative year for me. It is the year that my love affair with the movies began.
Movies are amazing. They capture dreams, embrace emotions, and interpret an often strange world to us. The first movie I saw was the magical “Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs” and as an added bonus there was a trailer for “The Magical World Of Topo Gigio”. The colors floored me. Projected on a changeover system with that deep acetate color; projected by someone who really know what they were doing. The music entranced me, the story held me and as my four year old self left the theater clutching my mother’s hand I knew something had changed. Later that year “The Sound Of Music” was released.
My uncle Jim took me and a bunch of my wild cousins to the movies, not a task for the meek. I knew about “The Sound Of Music”, because as a young Catholic schoolboy there was some wacky stuff about nuns at the end of the picture, it was the buzz of the playground. One thing about nuns is that they seldom get wacky. When the two sisters come out on screen and displayed parts of the Nazi’s vehicles which they had just removed, the audience erupted with glee. The Von Trapp family who we had just spent the the last 174 minutes with escaped due to the interference of some very well meaning sisters.
In the fall my Uncle Ken brought home “Cat Ballou” which he was showing at the school where he worked. The print was in 16mm and he also brought home a Bell and Howell projector. He had made a small theater in his basement and began to show the movie. I was captivated, Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin, Stubby Kaye and the always great Nate King Cole drew me into the story. The flickering images combined with the clatter of sprockets going through a film gate at 24 frames per second was hypnotic. The other kids quickly got bored yet, I was transfixed on the screen.
I look back at my adventures in cinema and wave after waves of nostalgia hits. I fear that the joy I had felt, and the sense of discovery I was gifted with will not be experienced by future generations.
If one was to take a very high level view of the motion picture exhibition industry this summer, one could make the argument , hey it’s going pretty good. But if one really drills down on the business you can see highly priced admissions coupled with a possible admissions bubble due the surge in popularity in subscription plans like MoviePass.
In response, theaters mostly decided to increase the ticket price in order to prop up revenue. According to data from the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO), the average ticket price hit a new high of $9.23 in 2018 on average. The rise in ticket price, however, is also making movie-goers more selective about the movies they pay to see, which, in turn, further contributes to the decline in movie attendance.
Probably the biggest impact on the market is the changing of Hollywood’s release strategies. Because of the need to address the global market in a cross cultural manner studios have concentrated on big-budget superhero movies and tent pole movies leading to fewer releases in total and a decreased number of lower budget studio releases. With fewer choices appealing to an increasingly diversified audience, movie goers are looking elsewhere for entertainment, abandoning smaller and independent theaters who continually struggle to stay afloat. Just this year two theaters in New York City which feature smaller movies, the Landmark Sunshine Cinema and Lincoln Plaza Cinema ceased doing business for good. It is a shame and a deep loss for the cultural make-up of our society.
The movie studios know full well that there is deep value in controlling demand of movies over controlling supply of movies. The business model of movie theaters rests solely on controlling the supply of movies. Netflix, on the other hand, is all about controlling demand by going directly to the consumer and owning that consumer relationship. This is now the resolute goal of all the studios, and I have stated many times before, this is the end game which will severely damage the core business of the movie theatre in a most likely lethal fashion. In smaller markets, theaters are already felling the pain of reduced runs, when at one time the average theater release was 3300 prints, now studios are often cutting those numbers in half. Unfriended was cut to 1500 theaters, Mama Mia 2 1800 theaters.
Literally the small market and the independent theaters are being denied product by the major studios. This is after having them expend tens of thousands of dollars in order to convert to digital. As an aside I heard from a couple of theaters owners that one VPF program has not paid them in a 14 months.
The core issue, no matter what others might say facing theaters is the roller coaster ride they have been put on by the major studios. The studio demand conversion, promise2 VPF’s to subsidize, then deny prints because they do not want to pay the VPF’s, a system that they had a hand in creating and more importantly promoting.
Independent theaters must if they want to survive, get into the business of content distribution. Theater owners need smaller and more diverse movies or they are in danger of losing audiences all together. One of the things I have suggested is creating some form of an informal alliance between an independent theater buying co-op and the International Film and Television Alliance.
The Independent Film & Television Alliance is a Los Angeles based trade association that represents companies that finance, produce, and license independent film and television programming globally. Its roster of 150 member companies in 23 countries include independent production and distribution companies. IFTA members create more than 500 independent movies. Many of these movies deserve time on a movie screen, but due to a lack of access to the theatrical exhibition business, they are hampered. What would happen if 50 of these titles were to find a place in the theatrical window…it would be a game changer. A wider and more diverse movie offering would breath life into a sometimes stagnant market.
Now on top of the output of the IFTA members, some additional 5000 feature length motion pictures are produced every year. 95% of these movie never see any form of distribution but to be honest most of these movies do not really deserve distribution….but there are some, a small percentage that are well produced, thoughtful, and market worthy. Last week I had a discussion with a company in Europe that has a huge library of event titles that more than deserve the big screen, but they cannot figure out how to do it on a scale to be successful. I think that within the independent theatre lies the answers for these orphaned movies.
It is time to cast a wider eye on who supplies product to the theatre. I think it is time to move far beyond the constraints of Hollywood. If not, then theaters will continue to be victimized by an ever increasing exploitative movie economy.
What I really want is people to fall in love again with the movies, just like I did in 1965. I want movie goers to feel what I felt and I want people to realize how previous movie going really is. It is at its best, the Cathedral of dreams.
