Welcome to the new Film-Tech Forums!
The forum you are looking at is entirely new software. Because there was no good way to import all of the old archived data from the last 20 years on the old software, everyone will need to register for a new account to participate.
To access the original forums from 1999-2019 which are now a "read only" status, click on the "FORUM ARCHIVE" link above.
Please remember registering with your first and last REAL name is mandatory. This forum is for professionals and fake names are not permitted. To get to the registration page click here.
Once the registration has been approved, you will be able to login via the link in the upper right corner of this page.
Also, please remember while it is highly encouraged to upload an avatar image to your profile, is not a requirement. If you choose to upload an avatar image, please remember that it IS a requirement that the image must be a clear photo of your face.
Thank you!
Meanwhile, Siff Cinema Downtown (nee Seattle Cinerama) has been packed all weekend.They have 570 seats and were close to sold out for every show. (It isn't the easist place to get to, and doesn't have its own parking.) My daughter was there Friday night and is back again right now. A friend was there all day Saturday.
I bet there are a lot of multiplexes that didn't sell 500 tickets all weekend, much less for one showing.
Siff Cinema Downtown is showing classic films on a 60-foot-wide screen. I bet they got a better percentage than they would have gotten for new releases, and they are charging ~$20 a ticket.
Seems like there's money to be had showing classics on really big screens (in decent-sized markets). If only more distributors and exhibitors would take note.
When the writers' and actors' strikes kicked off, Hollywood responded with a kneejerk reaction, pushing the release of all the tentpoles they had in the pipeline into late 2024 or even '25. Last fall, there was quite a bit of non-Hollywood stuff to keep the theaters ticking over (e.g. Sound of Freedom and the Taylor Swift pic), but apart from ISS (which I thought was pretty good, and somewhat underrated) there doesn't seem to be many indie-crossover-to-mainstream movies around at the moment. Argylle got moderate to negative reviews, so I'm not surprised that it's tanking.
I haven't really looked at our numbers, but management tells me we did "OK" over the weekend.
I think we were helped a little bit by the lousy weather here in Northern CA over the weekend.
It was just windy & rainy enough for people to want to get out of the house for the day or evening,
but not bad enough for them to want to stay home. Southern CA, where Leo is, got hit much
worse by the storm. We did loose power overnight for a while after the theater closed, and it
was a pain to bring everything back online the next morning, but at least it happened when no
one was in the building. We also apparently had a nitrogen leak, that may or may not have been
connected to the power outage, which meant they couldn't sell any tap beer or soda all day Sunday.
I was in Goleta (about five miles north of Santa Barbara) until about 6p on Saturday evening. When I left, and throughout the drive back to Loma Linda, it wasn't even raining. The rain didn't start here until late evening on Sunday. From what I've seen and read, from around Monterey north had serious problems on Sunday, but the fun in the southland didn't begin until Sunday-Monday night. Here in the 909, we had around 18-20 hours of constant, moderate rain (harder than drizzle, but by no means a monsoon), which stopped about an hour ago. There have been one or two reports of road accidents and one mudslide up near Big Bear, but thankfully, it looks like - so far, at any rate - we've dodged most of the bullets.
We are playing catch-up with the Christmas-era movies right now. We did really well with "The Boys in the Boat" last week and not bad at all with "The Beekeeper" this week.
While not *entirely* abysmal due to Boys in the Boat being a saving grace, we are down 70% comparative to last year when we had the titles A Man Called Otto and 80 for Brady. By the time we're getting to filler films from the past couple weeks, there is essentially nothing to play that isn't already available to rent at home.
I can barely look at ComScore grosses for anyone right now. Awful.
Unfortunately April looks to be the scariest month this year with predicted grosses lower than 2021. Although many of them not looking that much better in the late summer/fall. It's not such a bad time to be a single screen......
Telefilm revealed the results of a yet-to-be-published study conducted by ERm Research on audience behaviour, which included this distressing – though perhaps not completely shocking – statistic: 98 per cent of movies watched in Canada last year were consumed at home, not inside theatres.
The Super Bowl blues descended on theatres, as this is traditionally one of the slowest weekends of the year for moviegoing. Over the past three days, all films produced only $37.9M, the lowest so far this year. This is saying something, considering that January 2024 had the lowest box office of any January in the past 28 years with the exception of 2021 and 2022 which were dragged down by the pandemic.
This discussion has been done over and over again in some form of course. Movie theaters nowadays have a lot to compete with, none of which is helpful to the bottom line. But the core of the problem simply is the lack of movies people want to see. If I look at what's available in cinemas around me right now, almost nothing can spark my interest. The few movies, that do, mostly alternative movies with far less reach, I've already seen weeks ago.
The current low we're seeing is the fallout from both the lengthly writers strike and the fact that Hollywood is apparently awe-struck by the recent string of failures of their non-inspired super-hero-super-blockbuster-series, among other high-profile dreck that flopped miserably on the big screen. Hollywood may have concluded that people don't want to watch movies in a theater anymore, while simultaneously ignoring last year's successes like Barbie and Oppenheimer. Let's hope Dune 2 can make some waves, to prove the point that there still is a lot of money to be made, as long as you provide content that people want to see.
Meanwhile, Hollywood should rewind the clock 25 years. Back then, they still managed to produce the occasional good movie, that wasn't based on some super-interlocked uninspired franchise and they managed to do so, without breaking the bank. We need more "content" like that. Today's production techniques actually should allow you to produce a professional Hollywood movie with far less resources than 25 years ago, but meanwhile, budgets of tent-pole movies have exploded to infinity and beyond, because every single second needs to be pulled out of the computer.
If Hollywood isn't stepping up their game, then I hope some of those deep-pocketed investors are listening, because the movie industry can still be a money-printing business, especially if you honor the release chain that had been established for decades. For Hollywood, it has always been the theatrical release that made the most money, everything else was icing on the cake. There is no reason this cannot work today, you only need a few parties producing good "content" that still commit to this principle and whether or not they're headquartered around some famous hills in Los Angeles should be irrelevant.
The SIFF Cinema in downtown Seattle WA was the former Seattle Cinerama Theatre. The screen is huge and curved bet It's more then 60ft. They are almost sold out because they offer something the other small theatres is Seattle don't have a giant curved screen with curtains and a Dolby Atmos sound system. Showmanship at It's best. A better curve then IMAX. The movie crowd in Seattle can't get enough of the presentation. Wait till they show some 70mm film prints or the old 3 projector Cinerama movies. They need to change the name to SEATTLERAMA THEATRE. Too bad the Forman Pacific Theatre family could not work out a deal for them to use Cinerama anymore.
I'd love to be able to see movies in a theater with a huge screen and high seating capacity. I still miss 1000+ seat venues like the Ziegfeld in NYC and GCC Northpark 1-2 in Dallas. When a single auditorium has over 1000 seats the room takes on an entirely different scale than normal-sized screening rooms. It's really something else when the huge room has a sound system that punches you in the chest the way the Northpark THX screen did. Obviously there is only a limited number of movie-going markets that can support such theaters.
On the other hand, I would strongly caution anyone from installing a deep curve screen just to have a new gimmick. Such screens can only work well if the auditorium is designed specifically for it. The projection booth needs to be level with the screen. That's on top of the projector using specialty lenses. It's possible to show movies very well on deep curve screens, but like I said the cinema has to be built for it. It sure can't be retro-fitted into some existing stadium seated room. Not unless the curve screen is a LED screen with no projector.
One thing that may be interesting to note regarding curved screens is that the latest generation of Christie projectors do support "digital warping" of images in their DCI projectors. While digital warping will impact the picture fidelity to some extend, it is capable of correcting for geometric errors in a more universal and flexible way than using special lenses. What digital warping can't fix though, is uniform focus across the entire surface of highly warped surfaces.
I do like deeply curved screens, if done right. Although I don't think they're a good match for all kinds of movies. Those screens work beautifully for wide-angle panoramic shots, but close-up shots can suffer from the inherent geometric deformation to a point that it becomes somewhat distracting.
I still remember the Hateful Eight in Ultra-Panavision 70, a format that can benefit greatly from a curved screen, but most of the movie consisted of interior shots. Those shots would've looked weird on a deeply curved screen like a Cinerama screen. But a movie like Ben Hur, will look magnificent on a deeply curved screen, even after 65 years...
Tweet
Comment