Commentary
With Lower Movie Attendance, TV May Help Boost Revenue
- by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, September 15, 2017
When it comes to the immediacy of entertainment, theatrical movies may be in the worst position of any content segment. It’s a real-time problem.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs media conference in New York this week, Lachlan Murdoch, executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, said “you spend way too much in making the film in the first place, and then you spend tens and tens of millions of dollars marketing that film.”
“[Then] you go to a 45-day theatrical window, and then there's a blackout for another 45 days, where the consumer can’t access that content anywhere, no matter what they're willing to pay or do.”
Finally, he says, the movie comes to TV screens. Murdoch says the journey needs to change. Movies need to get to home viewing sooner.
But to achieve this goal, movie studios still need to go through local theater owners, who have been reluctant to help. What’s in it for them? Movie studios may want changes, but they don’t want to lose their major distribution system.
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One idea that has been floated seems to allow theater owners to share some of the new money from future home digital viewing of theatrical movies.
The idea may be akin to how TV-movie studios work with TV stations, when it comes to programming on new digital platforms. Local TV network affiliates might either sell digital ad time or receive an ad share of those digital platforms for their network affiliation.
However, this move doesn’t deliver big bucks for TV stations. And that might explain why movie theater owners are reluctant to adopt this option. Once they agree to a comprehensive deal with movie studios to alter theatrical windows, the whole exhibitor-studio infrastructure could drastically change.
Murdoch isn’t the first major TV-movie executive to moan about this. (His brother, James Murdoch, did the same a year ago.)
Other executives have complained as well.
What will fuel an agreement? Perhaps a few more eye-opening theatrical moviegoing periods going south. This past summer’s shocking 16% decline in box-office revs was, for many, their own internal disaster movie.
Wayne Friedman is West Coast Editor of MediaPost. You can reach Wayne at wayne@mediapost.com.
The main profit for Hollywood films comes from TV/video, not their share of the threatical box office receipts and this has been true for many decades. If you wish to speed up the process, fine, but you must work out a new deal with the theatre chains that allows them to make a profit while covering most of the movie-makers' production costs. As for moaning about the costs of promoting their theatrical releases, that's all part of the deal. But are the movie companies still paying vastly inflated primetime CPMs---that special "movie rate"---for TV exposure on Thursdays and Fridays just prior to the big movie-going nights? If so, they might think that one over. Why not spread out the buys in all dayparts and on all days---especially via cable---and use digital advertising on Thursdays and Fridays to hype "date night" theatrical attendance?
Movie theatres have large venues and no people. There are so many creative people in this world and no one can figure out how to use those venues profitably for anything besides movies in empty rooms ?