This was an interesting year as far as Midnight movies go. I was able to bring back the series after not doing it for a few years. We stopped doing it because so many movies were no longer available on 35mm film.
With the purchase of a high definition professional video projector I was able to bring the movies back by playing them off Blu-Ray. The new projector made an image about the same size as our flat film picture and almost as good. I wasn't comfortable charging money to see anything with the old projector we had in the room but that's not the case now.
Overall the Midnight series made a good profit. Only a few films lost money, there were some surprises as to what didn't do well ( Office Space, The Notebook) and what did do well ( V For Vendetta, Christmas Vacation).
The biggest surprise was The Room. A movie I had never heard of until students started asking for it. In case you are unfamiliar, it's a very bad movie that people see to laugh at how bad it is as well as some Rocky Horroresqe actions like throwing plastic spoons as certain points. We ended up playing it three times, the first two times we did about 300 people, the last time 150. Considering the last showing was just before exams started I was expecting about that number.
We made quite a bit of money off The Room showings as not only did we sell a lot of tickets but they bought a lot of food. I forgot to bring my camera for the last showing or I would have taken pics of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of plastic spoons all over the theatre.
The midnight series made money even without the money from The Room so it was definitely worth doing, plus everyone had a great time at the movies.
The series will be back next year with some of the same movies and some that haven't shown before. Some of the films after Christmas didn't do as well as I thought they would which I think is purely timing. Students are busier in the spring than fall. As an experiment I'm going to play some of those films earlier next year and see if it make a difference. For example Monty Python's Holy Grail did about 100 people in September but Life of Brian only had about 45 in March. Next year I'll play them in the opposite order and see what happens.
I'll be doing up the Fall schedule in August so feel free to e-mail suggestions to wfilm@uwo.ca
No comments:
Post a Comment