Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Matinees

I tried playing matinees this weekend for Shrek 3. We haven't played matinees in several years. When Rainbow opened they took enough of the kid's market to make it uneconomical for us to play them any more.
During the summer I play more kid's films than during the school year. Partially just because there are more and partially because during the school year there are often more student oriented movies available (and more students). During the school year the theatre is heavily used on the weekends so I often can't play matinees even if I wanted to.
I know when I play a kid's movie I often get asked if I plan to play matinees so I figured there might be enough demand to try it again. I decided to experiment with Shrek 3. I figure if anything will bring people out for matinees it will be Shrek.
The experiment worked. I can't be too specific but I needed a certain amount of business to pay for the staff costs, we did a little over double that amount so I'm happy.
I plan to play matinees for other kid's movies such as Harry Potter and Evan Almighty. We'll see if it continues to work.
I considered bring in movies for just matinees like we used to but after some calculations decided it wouldn't work. For a movie like Shrek there isn't a lot of extra cost if the film bombs except staff since we were already playing the film. If I was to bring in a movie like Surf's Up for just matinees it would have to cover the entire minimum rental by itself. That plus the extra staff costs means we would have to have a heck of a lot of people show up just to pay for it.
The interesting thing is what to do about the long movies as far as matinees go? (see next post)

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