Bobby/ Tenacious D is the last playweek for Western Film for 2006. We close for the holidays on Dec 22nd and reopen on Jan 8th.
Since we don't open until Monday we get a partial playweek which is fun to deal with. Since everything is closed up there I can't really advertise the way I normally would. What I've done the last couple years is book something we already did well with for the 4 days. Last year it was Wedding Crashers.
unfortunately there no obvious movie to do that with this year. We've had a bunch of movies do well but nothing as big as Wedding Crashers. The biggest movie this fall was Inconvenient Truth but we played the crap out of it and it's out on video.
What I'm planning to do is see if Fox will let me book Borat for the first 4 days and continuing into the next playweek. We'll see if they go for it.
4 comments:
How about playing some old time movies! I like Citizen Kane or the Walking dead! Love the classics!
Can't tell if that last one is a legitimate comment or an ad but the website it links to looks interesting anyway.
In the age of video old movies can't be played by theatres except in a very specific context such as our midnight series.
Actually, I found that the old films did quite well when I was in undergrad at UBC. They only had the screen for five days of the week, I think, and it was second-run releases for Friday-Sunday, and classics for Wednesday-Thursday. I understand that you've got to deal with distributors who want things to be up for seven days, but I'd love to catch some of the classics you play at "normal" hours. (I have banker circadians, what can I say...)
For instance, there's little that beats catching "Lawrence of Arabia" on the screen, but there's no way that I could hack being up until past 3am for it. And wouldn't it be better to play "Kill Bill" as a complete set on the same night, anyhow? Or Episodes IV-VI? Just a thought.
I agree there's nothing like catching movies like Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen but since the advent of home video that has all but disappeared.
The studios do want their newer releases for all 7 nights but even if that wasn't the case I couldn't play old films. Some reasons are no prints (Pink Floyd the Wall), bad prints (Raiders of the Lost Ark) or movies pulled out of service I can't play (Bladerunner, all the Star Wars movies.)
But basically it all boils down to what we can pay for. It takes about 50 people just to pay for the rental on a one time show. Then there's staff, advertising etc.
The midnight shows are only possible because we can piggyback them on Western Film's regular advertising.
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