sbp

http://news.independent.co.uk/digita...p?story=434778

In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."

But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.

Five years ago, when summer movies were arguably just as bad as they are now, the average audience drop-off between a film's opening weekend and its second weekend was 40 per cent. This summer, it has been 51 per cent. In some cases, the drop-off has started between the film's opening on a Friday night and the main screenings on Saturday. The upshot: unsuccessful films disappearing from cinemas so fast that there is no time for second opinions.

A 56 per cent drop over the first week of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was not what the studio moguls had expected. As Arnold Schwarzenegger himself might say, hasta la vista, baby.

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MPAA: "Its all your fault, every single one of you who used IM to warn others about sh*tty movies."

gear02

wow...that's the biggest load of bullsh*t since the RIAA...

attgig

maybe it is....


but....THAT'S A GOOD THING!!!

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Merlin

Funny how they seem to forget that this could work the other way. That is, if by some twist of fate they made a good movie people could spread that word faster as well and help a good but little marketed movie take off.

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Ladogaboy

Am I missing something?

I thought for sure that this was some sort of sarcastic satire....

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cheapchinese

piracy~~~~
opening night....camera day~~
saturaday.....downloading.....
sunday....complete...and enjoy

bachviet

That's funny....

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Kevster

There was an article about this in the LA Times last Sunday. It essentially showed that Hollywood was learning yet again that if they put crap out there it is going to flop even faster now. If anything, this lastest communications revolution will educate movie studios yet again that if they make better quality movies people will go to see them. The word-of-mouth effect of both text messaging and the internet is rapidly changing Hollywood's bottom line. There is no better way of teaching them that bombs like Gigli just shouldn't be made.

gear02

Unfortunately, that would probably not be the case. Look at the music industry. The internet, file sharing, mp3s, etc SHOULD have changed the Music Industry's by making them change their business model. Instead, they decide to blame technology for piracy and lowering their profits (not to mention of course that there's a RECESSION going on, maybe that's the cause).

Maybe the movie industry might be smarter, but I see them banning communications devices and suppressing internet reviews in order to maintain the status quo.

revil

maybe they'll decide to make better movies then.... or go riaa's route and sue everyone with a text-message enabled phone.

bachviet

If that happened, I should start DL movies instead of music.

Kevster

This isn't about piracy (for once). This is about people telling eachother in a very rapid fashion via text messaging or the internet that a movie sucks and they shouldn't waste their money and/or time with it (See my post on Gigli as a perfect example). That legitimately hits Hollywood directly in the 'nads because the movies they have been shoveling to us this summer mostly suck ass.

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I think over again
My small adventures, my fears.
The small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach.

And yet there is only one great thing, the only thing:

To live to see the great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.

-old Inuit song

Merlin

Change sometimes happens fast and sometimes it happens slowly. But mostly it won't happen until something shocks you into it. Remember the old saying...the only person who likes changes is a wet baby.

Here I think we are seeing the humble beginnings of change.

Bires

It's like when they blamed the royal suckiness of Tomb Raider 2 (the movie) on the extra-royal suckiness of Tomb Raider 4 (the game).

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Five years...

gear02

I know it's not about piracy. I'm just talking about how institutions in this country is slow to react to technological changes...

Maarchk

conside me an ingnorant bastard... but ummm
so kids text message that this movie is not good....
would they not text message that this movie is good?

they blame people giving their opinion as why their bad movies fail.... maybe if they weren't bad movies they wouldnt do poorly?

the two movies i liked, Saving Nemo, and the Italian job have held up pretty well.. and i told peopel i liked them....

hmm funny.. the movies that cater to people and are well done, make money... such an abstract idea...

instead of, well we spent 200 million... YOU HAVE TO LIKE THIS MOVIE...

i seriously belive the RIAA and the MPAA have got blinders on.

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cheapchinese

if they did refunds for bad movies.. then i might stop texting

whitak24

i love how they blame "texting" for the decline in movie grosses, yet the week 1 to week 2 dropoff is greater now than it was 5 years ago.

think about it: if it's really instant messages from inside theaters that are killing movie revenues, wouldn't that mean hold down week 1 grosses, meaning that the week-to-week drops would be lower (lower week 1 grosses means the movie doesn't have so far to fall).

now if they could show that the typically manifested pattern of thursday to friday to saturday box office pulls differed substantially from historical norms (basically, that thursday/friday showings were pulling similar grosses, but saturday/sunday grosses were down), then i might believe the "texting" theory.

instead, i would argue that the increased use of internet message boards and email is to blame. the stats show that word of mouth communication is perhaps faster than it used to be, but it is still not instant. consequently, we need to find what technologies that spread rapidly in the past 5 years that have sped up communication, but not made it instant. so i would say that message boards and email fit that set of facts better than text messages.

Ladogaboy

Are you telling them to sue G|A?

whitak24

well, if that's the conclusion they came to, i suppose they could try, but i think a judge would laugh them out of court even quicker than the fox news/al franken suit was dismissed

Joshua

yeah, they'll go the RIAA route soon and start suing users of text phones and they'll try to track them via subpeona's to the phone companies..

Maybe they'll even start sending out mass texts to people saying how awesome the movie was!

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"Like I ****ing said, "Ok, so I hear it may be a repost. Blah But I had never seen it, so..." **** you Canta." -Jenny 12/4/2003