Posted on 07/17/2011 11:09:54 AM PDT by Bigtigermike
Approximately $5,000 per screen through Saturday night
"What would have taken months and cost millions, ARC did in weeks with virtually no traditional media advertising"
Wider national rollout to commence in the coming weeks
SANTA MONICA, Calif., July 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- ARC Entertainment, the distributor of "The Undefeated," the film about Gov. Sarah Palin's rise from obscurity to national prominence, announced today that through Saturday night the film had a stronger opening than expected with the large markets trending towards weekend per screen averages above $10,000 driven by multiple sold-out runs. The film had accumulated approximately $5,000 per screen through Saturday night. Unique in the theatrical feature world, "The Undefeated" was rushed to select digital theatres in only 3 weeks, and was marketed almost entirely through social media and grass roots efforts, with virtually no traditional media spend. With the strong initial showing, the film is going to a wider release footprint later this month, with details being announced soon.
[...]
"We are extremely pleased with the audience reaction, which has been over-the-top enthusiastic and very passionate, including standing ovations at most screenings," said Trevor Drinkwater, CEO of ARC Entertainment, the film's distributor. "We expect word-of-mouth to keep ticket sales strong and we will definitely expand the film to a wider national audience. With merely three weeks of preparation and a virtually non-existent traditional advertising spend, the film did exceptionally well. " .
"We have been told the theaters in Phoenix, Atlanta,
Over the weekend reports also documented the strong ticket sales and enthusiastic audience reaction. Reuters reported, "It may not be 'Harry Potter,' but another film featuring a bespectacled protagonist is racking up strong pre-sales before its national roll-out this weekend." AOL's Patch reported,"
(Excerpt) Read more at prnewswire.com ...
I’m kind of sorry for even being in this thread now. I want the movie to come to a theater near me. I just get fascinated with box office numbers, and it’s fun when it comes up here, which isn’t that often, so I like to do the analysis when it does.
At least it distracted me from the less-than-stellar ending to that Japan-USA match (which I feared we would lose once I heard them say Obama was watching and cheering on our team).
Geez...
I think there’s some more PDS on this thread.
Here is wikipedia’s definition of ‘limited release’, including the limited-release strategy of ‘platform release’, for which per theater grosses are identified as the key metric for broadening to a wider rollout and marketing. I’d submit that TU is a classic example of that as described:
“Limited release
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Limited release is a term in the American motion picture industry for a motion picture that is playing in a select few theaters across the country (typically in cities such as New York and Los Angeles).
A limited release is often used to gauge the appeal of specialty films – especially of documentaries, independent films and art films. A common practice by major film studios is to give highly anticipated and critically acclaimed films a limited release in December in New York and Los Angeles in order to qualify them for an Academy Award nomination, as set out by the rules outlined by the Academy. These films would often receive a wider release later in January or February.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which first premiered in 1975, is still shown at limited theaters making it now the longest-running theatrical release in film history.[1][2]
Yet a new meaning may come to the term Limited Release as an upcoming DVD and Video On Demand experiment will see films released on the these platforms after only a month or so in theaters. Meaning the term would refer to the month long theatrical release in Canada and the United States, as opposed to films just release in Los Angeles and New York.[3]
Platform Release
A platform release is a limited release strategy, whereby the film opens in only a few theaters, then gradually expands to more theaters as word of mouth spreads and the marketing campaign gains momentum.[4] Depending on the film’s success, there is even the possibility to expand into a wide release. The advantage of this strategy is that marketing costs are conserved until a film’s performance has been established. This way, if a film turns out to be very popular or critically acclaimed, the distributor may opt to spend more money than originally planned and push for a wider release; if the movie flops, the distributor can withdraw from the campaign without having spent much money promoting and advertising the film.
In the early stages of a platform release, the key metric is the per-theater average gross, not the total box office gross.[5] Art house and independent movie theaters like to see a high per-theater average, as proof that they will be successful if they release the film. A distributor using this release strategy must take care that they don’t expand the release to quickly: If a film is successful early on, many theaters will be interested in playing it - but if the distributor releases the film into too many theaters at this stage, the limited audience will be spread over multiple theaters, lowering the per-theater average and making the film appear weaker.”
The hate mongers are out at the Internet Movie Data base and more likely than not have been stuffing the ballot box with bad reviews. I bet only a handful of those who give it a single star even saw the movie. If you want to counter the usual lies click here.(You will have to register an email address but if you want to stay anonymous you can always create a Hushmail account first)
“10 theaters. That isn’t a limited release”
According to the latest figures, for 2009, there are 39,233 movie screens and 5942 cinema sites in the US. Ten screens out of over 39K (or 10 theaters out of almost 6000, whichever way you want to look at it) sounds pretty limited to me.
Sources: http://www.natoonline.org/statisticsscreens.htm
http://www.natoonline.org/statisticssites.htm
That's not something good. See Luke 11:17 and Luke 11:23.
Cheers!
We are talking about per-screen numbers, so it doesn’t matter how many theaters you are in. In fact, the fewer theaters, the better, because it drives people who want to see the movie to the few theaters that are showing it (although with only 10 theaters, we are well past that effect).
There are three things that matter. The first is the price of the ticket, which I presume was standard for the movie.
The second is the number of seats in the theater. And it is true that they scheduled the showings in the smaller digital screens; the article notes that in some cases the theaters moved to the bigger digital screens because of the crowds.
But the 3rd is the number of showings in a day (or, in some cases, the number of showings at which you might expect people to attend). I believe that the Palin movie premiered on Friday evening, so they didn’t have all-day showings, but movies that DO have all-day showings generally don’t draw as many people during the day on Friday as they do during the day on Saturday. I also don’t know if the Palin movie showed all day saturday, or only a few times.
Showing fewer times would increase the number of people in each screening, and might lead to sold-out shows; however, I have seen no reports that people were turned away on Saturday (there were sellouts on Friday for the 1st showings, according to the article).
The point is that for a normal movie release, Saturday is virtually always much bigger than Friday, because people are free all day and go to the movies all day, where they don’t on Friday. That rule fails for huge blockbusters, because first people do tend to skip work and school, and second some do the midnight premiere, which gets huge audiences and adds to the number of total screenings on Friday, driving up the numbers.
Now, I would take it as a good thing that theaters had to move to the larger screenings to fit the audience. And it may be that there were extenuating circumstances unique to this movie that makes a 29% increase more meaningful. But in general, there are known patterns in the movie industry, and by those normal patterns, Undefeated’s first night was really good, and the Saturday wasn’t nearly as good.
BTW, and this is one of those nit math things, but if you used all but 30% of the seats, that would mean you used 70% of the seats; if you had 100 seats, 70 people were seated. If you then increased to ALL the seats (100), you would have added 30 people, which would be a 43% increase, not a 30% increase.
You can sense the scent of POd PDSer in the wind. I see a few are already denying the implications of the blowout limited run.
Typical tantrum.
GO SARAH!!!!
Thanks for the charted information. I hope the film will reach the Seattle market. And I’ll even consider a drive to the more conservative eastern part of the state to see it. However, based on the numbers, it looks like Harry Potter will be our next president.
“Her messing with the MSM.... “
BZZZZTTT!!! Category error: Complainer implies that confronting MSM on their BS is bad.
Windy, every time I read a complaint from a Palin detractor spouting those/similar words or complaining that somehow it is a bad thing, here’s how it translated and what they really believe:
1: She’s fighting back and that disrupts the status quo I like, so I don’t like it. She should just shut up.”
2: If she fights back she might inspire others to question what they are spoon-fed and start to fight back also...refer back to #1.”
There is no argument that a Palin detractor can make about ‘messing with the media” that does fit the above.
Did you catch my point by point dis-assembly of all those ridiculous PDS talking points? There was enough meat there to pen a 10,000 word article, but hey, a fella can only invest so much in a brick wall, ya know?
Do you think we’re nearing the crescendo of this madness, or will it increase in the coming weeks and months?
I saw a story today that they were setting up grief counseling for Harry Potter fans who just watched the last movie and can’t accept that there aren’t any more.
God I hope they get sick of acting like a bunch of frustrated tween schoolgirls and just quit annoying the adults in the room, but I doubt it.
They have invested so much time and effort into their PDS that when she gets in and dominates the campaign, they will just pick apart every successful thing she does and twist it like said catty schoolgirls to mean something totally different - thus their ‘evidence’ that they were right all along.
When she wins, they will cast themselves as the ‘loyal opposition” wing of the ‘conservative’ movement in order to ‘keep her honest’
When she begins to turn the country around, they will oppose her methods.
When she pulls it of, they will give credit to all others and label here a mere figurehead.
When she retires after 8 years and her VP does 8 more, they will scoff and say that it was all the work of the American people and that if Palin wasn’t elected ‘back then’ any other Republican could have done the same or better.
Psychiatrists once called this ‘insanity’.
The balance of your post is spot on, and as you said, "psychiatrists once called this insanity."
Every person is hard-wired to be right at all times. To be wrong, is to die. Perhaps that hard-wiring comes from our species' formative times, in which being right or wrong really did mean the difference between life and death. Like many other primitive impulses and instincts, it remains with us.
I suppose that in some people, that impulse is simply too strong for the intellect to overcome. Even when confronted by airtight facts, logic, and reason, they insist that their erroneous conclusions are 'right'. Sorta like a liberal.
I've asked several of them lately, just what their response to Palin entering the contest and winning it will be. A couple have told me that they'll support her (good for them), but most others have dodged or ignored the question. My guess is that they'll do like you said in your post, and continue to criticize her, right through every success -- "just to keep her honest", of course.
Same arguments/rationales, shot down, disproved and tossed repeatedly for 3 years and they still go to the well to get'em. Like a mantra. Also falls under Goebbels' "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth."
Brother....
I've said before, that if I were moderating this place, I'd have a word or two with the type of posters we call PDSers. I'd let them know that they could either contribute some meaningful discussion to the forum, or they could take their stimulus-response behavior elsewhere.
I modded at a conservative forum five years back, and that was our policy. We had a zero tolerance for moonbat rantings, so if it walked like a duck, and talked like a duck, it got the zot -- no matter what it was posing as. There were even times when I was forced to reluctantly close the account of a long-time member, because they'd clearly, and permanently gone off the deep end.
Our operating policy over there was, "it's not about you, it's about us." The community of regulars was more important than any one poster's "rights" to disrupt, or cause continual mayhem. It was run as a benevolent dictatorship, and was wildly popular. At the time, it was the premier forum of its type on that network.
It's not my intent to counsel the management here, but I have hands on experience with this stuff, and know what works.
Hmm. I hope Obama’s campaign staff has something similar set up for Nov. 7th, 2012!
“whether you would support a candidate whose supporters merely yell down anyone who asks questions.”
To malign Sarah Palin based on an attempted characterization of her supporters is an Alinsky tactic, not a sincere criticism. This tactic is a type of link between you and other anti-Palin posters on this forum.
There’s a difference between merely pointing out your opinion that The Undefeated will not be the success we believe it will and hoping it won’t succeed.
How do the Roves, Krauthammers, Soroses and their followers feel about the fact that Palin’s “flaws” they had hoped for two years ago have turned out to be nonexistent while her successes have skyrocketed? Why do you run from acknowledging this fact, and doesn’t it represent a level of success rendering your arguments completely meaningless?
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