Midweek releases help movies steal a march on the competition
A decade ago, release date etiquette was easy. Films opened on a Friday, with only the occasional movie sneaking out a day early. Most tickets were sold at the weekend, and this was the period that always featured in box-office reports. In an age of appointment TV, tempting audiences into cinemas midweek was a challenge.
Today, it's a different story. Friday is still the presumed release date for films, but exceptions are now so common they can barely be termed exceptional. This summer alone, we have seen films large (Avengers Assemble), small (Leave it on the Floor) and all points in between pursue a midweek strategy. Some releases worked (The Amazing Spider-Man boosted its opening tally with £4.3m of previews), others did not (What to Expect when You're Expecting added just £69,000), and the trend is showing no sign of abating. Next week, borstal drama Offender gets the jump on the competition with a Wednesday release, and the following Monday big hitters Brave and The Bourne Legacy enter the fray, a whole four days before the rest of that week's releases. No wonder that the proportion of UK box-office earned from Monday to Thursday has risen from 32% in 2002 to 42% last year.
For Variety's Robert Mitchell, a former sales analyst in international distribution at Paramount, some of this is about bragging rights. He remembers 2004's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban being reported as the biggest ever UK opening, posting a "weekend" gross that included the late May bank holiday and a whole week of half-term. That film's £23.88m debut retains the record for a UK opening, which is an irony considering Azkaban is in fact the lowest-grossing of all the Potter films. By including preview takings in the opening tally for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter this summer, Twentieth Century Fox was able to claim the top spot for a title that would otherwise have come fifth.
"Not everyone follows box-office," says Mitchell, "but claims such as 'biggest ever opening weekend' and 'the nation's No 1 film' is the kind of thing that commands attention, and most people won't read the fine print. For audiences who are on the fence about seeing a film, buzz about box-office can sway them. It's still not as widely reported as in the US – it's really part of the culture there – but more places do publish the UK top 10 these days, and there's more talk about box-office on social media. There's a real proliferation of the information." And perhaps chatter about box-office has entered a vacuum left by music sales. "In the days of Top of the Pops, everyone knew what the No 1 single was," says Mitchell. "Now I don't even know how you would find out."
While distributors have long used previews to exploit school holidays, it has emerged as a year-round trend since the arrival of the Orange Wednesday offer in 2004. Initially conceived as a way of boosting sales on the poor-selling sixth day of a film's release, it is increasingly viewed by distributors as a great way to jump-start the box-office. Mitchell says that while not everyone in distribution is totally sold on the idea of releasing on Wednesday – "Why would you make a Buy-One-Get-One-Free offer on the first day of a film's release?" – it can be particularly effective for a film likely to benefit from word-of-mouth. Distributors are in any case increasingly using nationwide free "talker" screenings as a way to build advance buzz, and Orange Wednesday is a way of boosting the number of people talking about a film, while still grabbing some revenue. Mitchell says: "For a film like Magic Mike or Ted, getting the audience in early is all upside going into the weekend. People enjoy discovering a film ahead of their friends and evangelising on social media. How opening on Orange Wednesday helps a blockbuster with a pre-sold audience is more open to question. You might say it's like giving away money."
And of course, once one film is scheduled for midweek release, it can have a ripple effect. Hamish Moseley of Momentum Pictures, whose hits include The Woman in Black and The King's Speech, explains that because a Wednesday release will eat up two days of the previous film's run, there will be pressure for it to be preceeded by another mid-week opener. "The effect is cumulative. More films opening on a Wednesday mean that more films want to open on a Wednesday. In fact there are times when so many films opening midweek means that we relish a Friday opening as we'll be the only major release on that date, giving cinemagoers a truly fresh choice for the weekend." And ultimately it's a zero-sum game: pictures arriving midweek mean that others will be ejected from their screens two days early, or four days early in the case of those unlucky films making way for Brave and The Bourne Legacy.
With film reviews still appearing in most daily newspapers on Friday, movie critics might wonder if the midweek strategy is all part of some Machiavellian plot to grab the audience's cash before it has the benefit of their wisdom. Did Universal, for example, really release Battleship on a Wednesday because it thought the film would benefit from strong word of mouth? Or was it more a case of getting the film to market ahead of anticipated harsh criticism?
Mitchell isn't sure, partly because action blockbusters are viewed by studios as critic-proof, and partly because in the age of Facebook and Twitter any such strategy would be doomed. "If you've got a stinker on your hands, you can't avoid the negative of the social media world no matter which day you release," he says. "These days, there's just nowhere to hide."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/aug/02/box-office-weekend-comes-early
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