Movies at Home -- or -- The Continuing Erosion of the Archaic Theater Experience

Yeah, above is my idea of how to watch a movie these days.

We've all heard the complaints. Going to the movies has become less appealing over the years (I won't go into specifics again) while watching movies at home has gotten better. A good sound system doesn't cost that much and the latest 60-inch screens deliver that wow factor. (And really, the theater screen isn't that much bigger considering how much further away you sit from it. In fact, if you're in the back row of one of those plexes with tiny screens it could be worse. And, having to sit in the back row means the place is packed which brings with it other discomforts). Sorry, but the 'big screen' just doesn't compensate for aesthetic compromises that go with the theater experience.

The pictured set up is, admittedly, a bit much but you don't have to go that far to create a nice setting. Take away everything but the screen and sound system (and some chairs or a couch) -- that's all you need -- and you're there. Wanna watch in a few minutes? No problem. Want to catch the rest tomorrow? Easy. Want to pause it to make popcorn? Go ahead. Need to go to the bathroom...?

But, what if you want to watch a movie that just came out? That's the problem. You have to go to the theater to catch most new movies. Some are available on-demand but those usually aren't the hot ones. For the good stuff you still have to go through the movie-theater rigmarole.

But, why? 

Over at the Tribeca Film Festival blog Richard Greenfield and Brandon Ross (of BTIG) have this to say about the state of affairs:

• In a rapidly evolving media world, where HDTV penetration now exceeds 70% and the average US living room TV sold is 44″, the concept of forcing consumers to attend/pay for a movie in a theater for the first three-four months of a film’s lifespan feels increasingly archaic. The overwhelming majority of multichannel video homes are capable of utilizing video-on-demand, with the exponential growth of IP-enabled TVs (directly or via third-party devices); not to mention the growth of web-enabled iPads that have a sharper screen than any TV set. The stage is set for the “home” to become the new “theater.”

The average TV these days is 44 inches? Really? Here's their nifty chart:

They continue:

• Why Buy When You Can Rent?

• Falling DVD sales and consumers’ lack of interest in buying movies digitally (Electronic Sell-Through, EST) has received most of the blame for Hollywood’s financial problems. Hollywood is hoping that expanding the functionality of digital content, meaning a cross-device, cloud-based storage system for movies (Ultraviolet), will invigorate interest in buying movies. Unfortunately, the fundamental issue is that consumers no longer need to own content.

Duh. Totally freaking duh. I've never gotten the logic of the Ultraviolet thing. Who's going to buy a digital copy and store it online? For what purpose? This is indicative of Hollywood's backward thinking and desperation.

Sorry, but for most people the days of owning a library of movies is over. Nobody buys DVDs anymore. We rent. Click, stream, watch, done. How many people out there ever watch a movie a second time? There's no need to own it on disc or store a copy in an online vault.

Continuing from the article:

• The confluence of these technology catalysts has “raised the bar” for consumers to either leave their home and buy a movie ticket or to buy a movie on DVD or digitally. We expect the bar to move notably higher over the next few years as an increasing percentage of TVs become IP-enabled. Studios need to understand the “new” consumer and technological paradigms and work with them, not against them.

This is the heart of the problem facing Hollywood. Improved consumer level display platforms -- not just large TVs but also laptops, tablets, and smart phones -- make watching movies (even away from home) easier while increasing ticket prices as well as the price of gas and concessions (none of this money, the authors rightfully point out, goes to the studio), and crowds that are more bawdy makes watching movies at the theater less appealing.

BTIG's solution?

• We believe there would be substantial consumer interest in offering movies in the home four weeks after their theatrical release at $20-$25, and there could be meaningful interest in offering movies day-and-date into the home at prices as high as $50 (not everyone bought a ticket to a Saturday night boxing match or a WWF event, with many choosing Pay-Per-View and subsequently VOD to access the content). Furthermore, releasing movies earlier at home should not simply be rental/VOD, but rather offer consumers the ability to own a digital copy (Ultraviolet or iTunes) for a modest premium (sub $10 above the VOD price).

Can't argue. The cost of going to the theater, especially for a family, can easily approach or exceed $60 dollars. Add to that the logistics of getting everybody in the same place at the same time and a fee of $20-$50 to watch a new movie at home sounds like a fair deal. If you're single or a couple you could invite friends and split the cost -- have a movie party.

This arrangement would also allow studios to take advantage of expensive marketing campaigns that promote movies opening at theaters.

Greenfield and Ross drive the point home:

• It is worth remembering that movie studios keep only half of each movie ticket, but would keep 80%-plus of VOD/iVOD transactions. 

Right now Hollywood is compensating, to some degree, for the decline in domestic theater attendance with increased foreign business, but that can't last. Sooner or later, people in other countries will turn to other solutions and options in the same way we have and theater attendance will drop there as it has here. Just as the DVD boom ended so will the foreign box office boom.

Studios need to take steps in order to have a viable model in place when the bottom falls out. With gas prices (and the prices of everything else) increasing while the consumer is better able to watch movies when and where they want, theater business will only continue to erode.

It doesn't make sense for Hollywood to continue to make new movies primarily available only at the theater when people clearly would rather stay at home.

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Teaser Previews for Trailers -- or -- The Ongoing Death of Traditional Movie Marketing

At LAT, Ben Fritz pretty much hits the nail on the head with his write-up re: the new practice of previewing trailers, saying:

• The online video touted an epic unveiling from one of Hollywood's most revered filmmakers: "In three days, Ridley Scott returns to the genre he redefined...."

• For the next two days, subsequent videos ratcheted up the excitement for the new project from the director of "Alien." 

• Then, finally, it arrived: not the movie, not even the full-length trailer, but the one-minute "teaser" for Scott's upcoming 20th Century Fox release "Prometheus." 

• "We teased the teaser," said Fox Chief Marketing Officer Oren Aviv. "And it was viewed 29.7 million times." 

• This is the new world of trailers, in which the Internet and rabid fan culture have turned one- to three-minute ads, once seen only in theaters, into events promoted and analyzed as avidly as the films themselves. 

The newest examples, for 'Looper', with a talk-up by one of the stars and the director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rian Johnson, were released in countdown mode over the last two days. The next one will be released tomorrow and the trailer itself will roll out on Thursday. They're very well done and have generated positive buzz.

As Fritz says, we've seen these trailer teases for 'Total Recall', the latest 'Twilight', and of course 'Prometheus'. I love them, at least in concept. The campaign for 'Prometheus' strikes me as a bit tedious while the one for 'Totall Recall' has been pretty sharp. It's where the heat is -- the trailer -- and now, the build up to the trailer. This phase, whatever it ends up being called, is without a doubt the core of movie marketing today. If you can't generate good buzz with a trailer you're dead in the water.

We've come a long way from the days when trailers were discussed Monday morning at the office around the water cooler when you were barely able to remember details and set things up so badly nobody cared anyway. Today, online, buzz cranks up minutes after a trailer makes its debut. You can tell whether a movie will score almost immediately.

I think trailers, and now the slow-burn build up, work better than clips, featurettes, or even official movie sites. 'The Hunger Games' site was a hit, and a notable exception, but when, really, was the last time you spent any time at a movie site? Trailers are delivered on phones, pads, pods, notebooks, etc. You can watch one while waiting for the bus. It's an entertaining way to kill a couple minutes when you don't feel like doing much else.

Right now, traditional marketing like posters and billboards are looking old-school. Really, you could put nothing on a movie poster but the name of the movie and some basic boilerplate and the movie would be a hit if a) it was good and b) it had a good trailer campaign. It's all about the trailer. Nobody would avoid a movie because it has a poorly designed or boring poster. Movies that have lousy posters do great business all the time. Great posters, however, don't mean much either. You can create posters that all the bloggers talk about and everybody loves and the movie may still tank. Run a great trailer, though, and you're money.

I'm looking forward to the next iteration in trailer rollouts. We're in the middle of a campaign for 'Battleship' that's interesting. The first trailer got panned across the board. People figured the movie was a sure flop. But trailers got better and so did the buzz. The latest trailers play great and bear no resemblance to the first clunker, and the movie has steam. I wouldn't be surprised if this was done on purpose. The strategy could be: Start with a howler of a trailer, have all the bloggers make fun of your movie, then deliver better and better trailers that make your flick look like a come-from-behind gem that's must-see. Sounds weird, sounds stupid, but whether it was by design or dumb luck, that's exactly what happened with 'Battleship'.

The other new thing that we're sure to see more of is the motion poster. We've had a few primitive efforts but the one for 'Total Recall' strikes me as a cut above, thematic, and visually interesting. This could lead to cool things.

'Dynamic Content Posters' could have clickables that lead to movie sites, mouse-over hi-def stills, clips, or soundbites, and trailers that run within the poster itself. You could have a countdown clock (I know, tacky, but something to try) and imagery that changes every time the poster is viewed. That would renew interest daily or even several times a day. Bloggers would embed the media continuously if it kept changing instead of just once like we do now when a poster is released.

There's no reason to keep using technology from a bygone print advertising era to sell movies. Compared to trailers the buzz on movie posters is light. They're posted and forgotten the next day. The craft seems to be in decline as well. You see very few good posters anymore. Most are utilitarian at best.

Trailers sell sizzle. They've evolved and no one saw that coming. It's only a matter of time before posters and other marketing tools and strategies follow suit.

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'The Hunger Games' Gaming the System

Clips from Daniel Frankel's piece (paidContent.org) on 'The Hunger Games' approach to marketing:

• To amplify the impact of these campaigns, studios will pay the big social platforms—for Facebook, for example, they’ll often give up more than a doller per “like,” creating an illusion of social media buzz.

• Lionsgate’s campaign differed from most movie campaigns because it created, well, actual social media buzz. The key: instead of paying for likes, the studio put its resources into creating rich-media elements that far outstrip the ambition of simple games and other movie collateral, such as an interactive tour of the source novel’s “Capital,” which was accessible through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG). The tour wasn’t a movie ad—it was an interactive experience rendered from the book with painstaking detail. 

• “They simply appreciated the value of the book and fleshed out its world with a massive amount of content that’s designed to live on the web, well beyond what you see in the film itself,” the rival studio marketer said. “They activated the core fan base from day one, fired them up and let them carry the message to their friends, which in turn grew the fan base.” 

I saw very little of the marketing effort but what I did see was pretty cool, and any campaign that gets a video feature at NYT has to be considered a success. THG's interactive site was, hard to deny, impressive -- probably the best I've seen.

Frankel posits THG may have created a new model for movie marketing based on interactive content, tailored sites, widgets and games and such. I can't argue. We may have become inured to standard ads and trailers, and they cost much more than creating your own web destination for fans to explore.

Frankel continues:

• Promotional costs for a big Hollywood movie typically exceed $100 million. But Lionsgate, a so-called mini-major, coming off a series of bombs, doesn’t have that kind of money. It had to make do with a marketing budget of around $45 million, with a typical allocation of 8 to 10 percent of that going to digital media spending.

That speaks volumes. Really, it's amazing what Lionsgate accomplished with that kind of cash. By contrast, look how bad the campaign for 'John Carter' flopped around, how much more it cost, (and what it accomplished).

If the quality of production of sites like The Capitol Tour is there I think fans, or potential fans, will respond no matter what the genre or who the targeted audience is. I wouldn't be surprised to see this kind of marketing approach become the norm.

















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Cloverfield: New Movie Technique

The only thing that's new in this clip is the reveal in the last few seconds. Still, it's an entertaining bit of movie making. What JJ Abrams and director Matt Reeves have that is new is the 'This Is Actually Happening' camera technique. This differs from the 'You Are There' technique, most recently seen in 'The Bourne Ultimatum'. Actors in Cloverfield routinely spike the camera or behave in some other 'non-actorly' manner because it's not supposed to be a Hollywood movie, rather captured video of an actual event (which is happening right now). I don't think this approach has ever been taken before.

'The Blair Witch Project' differs in that its footage represents what an editor would have culled from a casual account of a camping trip after the video was discovered. That is, only the best parts of the video would have been used for the movie. Regular stuff would have been edited out.

In 'Cloverfield' the conceit is more complex. In this movie footage from a camera (or multiple cameras) is stitched together to present a realtime version of events. The difference between Cloverfield and Blair Witch is the editor for the Cloverfield footage is non-existent, whereas the editor for the Blair Witch footage was a real person who did their best to assemble the footage in the most compelling way. Blair Witch is then presented as if it were an edited version of the (discovered) video of an event which actually happened (instead of a Hollywood movie).

For Cloverfield the idea is that there is no editor (or producer or writer, or studio, etc), and the imagery is magically transported to the movie screen in your theater (and only your theater) as it is shot (in NYC) so you have a realtime account of a real event which is happening now. It's worth noting the storyline in Cloverfield takes place at night. [This is when most people go to the movies]. Having the action take place at night supports the feeling that the movie is taking place 'now'.

I know -- sounds stupid when you read it -- but this is the (subconscious) impression the audience is meant to have, and I think the strategy will work. Part of what will make 'Cloverfield' a success will be the visceral impact the movie will have because of the 'this-is-actually-happening (right now)' image-producing/editing approach. Word of mouth will be more effective than usual because people will infuse their description of the movie with the urgency of someone who actually lived through the events in the movie -- as opposed to the usual 'then, there was the part where they did such and such' spiel. Without knowing it people will describe this movie in the first-person, or with a first-person tone. And, without knowing it, the person they describe the movie to will sense that the person that is describing the movie to them had a great time (at the movie [which is being described]). And, that person (who has had the movie described to them) will want to see/experience the (events of the) movie (in the first-person) all the more.

It'll be both subtle and effective. Once again, hats off to JJ Abrams. He had a great concept for a shooting technique, produced a cool looking movie that everyone is talking about, and came up with one of the best marketing campaigns to date (and dumped it at the first sign it was getting on people's nerves). 'Cloverfield' is primed for success.