Monday, February 23, 2009

Warner must expect Watchmen to be big.


Warner is asking first run theatres for a three week, full shows, minimum. That's a week longer than most movies and many titles can be split the second week, especially movies that do no late night business such as kid's films.


So in order to book the film the theatre has to agree to play it for a minimum three weeks playing all shows on each screen. If it's the hit that everyone is expecting that would probably have happened anyway. However if it's one of those weird unexpected bombs those theatres will not be happy. A good example of this would be Speed Racer from last year. I was in England when it opened and it was playing on the main screen at one of the old movie palaces in Leicester Square. It was still playing there a couple weeks later but couldn't have been doing any business as that movie bombed so bad. I would imagine they had signed for a minimum run. I was quite annoyed because I was hoping Indiana Jones would open there. It was a much nicer theatre than the Odeon movie palace Indiana Jones opened in.


Minimum runs are one of the reasons single screen theatres are almost all gone. When I was in high school there was only one theatre with one screen in that city, the entire city! I always wondered why they would open a film and everyone would go the first week but they would keep playing it rather than something new. Some big movies get minimum runs of up to 4 weeks. This is one of the reasons I give to say it's a bad idea when anyone asks about making Western Film first run.

No comments: