Bad Start Of Summer Movies 2024

[Agnius Acus]

because they don't get the saturation advertising that Random Sequel Number 42 will get.

People aren't going to plonk down their twenty dollar bill on something that they don't already know about. It used to be that there were a lot of people would go out on Friday night and whatever's playing is what they got to see, but now in the absence of a specific desire to see Movie X they stay home and watch a random movie on Netflix instead.

Excellent point, Frank.

There are plenty of new, original films, it’s just that streaming fits those types of movies better, as it offers more time to achieve traction or even a cult following. It’s the new DVD with its new Fight Clubs and Donnies Darkos.

As for myself, I can‘t speak for the handful of other arthouse theatres in my country, let alone Europe as a whole, but we‘re doing great, meaning, not going out of business. We mostly screen new European films, so we don’t feel any shortage of original titles.

[Leo Enticknap]

You do not make the point that you think you are making when you call arthouse/speciality titles like Wicked Little Letters, She Said (which was both brilliant and moving), The Holdovers, Asteroid City, Empire of Light and others "D.O.A.", especially when you are talking runs of 1000 screens or less, because at that point the success of a film becomes very relative. The local non-profit arthouse here kept Licorice Pizza going for months to great box office. Tell the manager over there that it was DOA. Jesus Revolution actually found an audience and did pretty well for opening against Cocaine Bear, and it returned a very nice profit, not superhero movie numbers but by no means DOA. Did these pictures do Barbie numbers? Not at all. They also didn't do Barbie screen count or promotion either. That hardly makes them failures.

Agreed: if a movie only costs $30m to make, it doesn't need to gross half a billion to be considered successful. Perhaps the most radical recent example was Sound of Freedom, with production costs of $15m, low budget, viral marketing (e.g. the "pay it forward" campaign targeted at churches), and a gross of $250m. For a mega franchise installment, a $250m gross would be a catastrophic failure. The problem is persuading movie theater customers to take risks, sustainably and consistently, on movies that don't come from Hollywood, haven't had $100m on marketing alone spent on them, might have stars they've never heard of in them, etc. etc. In the last year, I saw ISS and Asteroid City to nearly empty houses. Those movies might have then made their production costs back, and more, from streaming views afterwards, but that isn't going to help the theaters. A trend I've noticed in Southern California, too, is the small chains and independents increasingly playing Mexican movies, but often unsubtitled (I presume because the costs of producing an English translation are considered too high relative to the number of ticket sales to non-Spanish speakers that would likely result), which of course limits their potential audience.

[Ryan Gallagher]

In the last year, I saw ISS and Asteroid City to nearly empty houses. Those movies might have then made their production costs back, and more, from streaming views afterwards, but that isn't going to help the theaters.

Asteroid City was one of my favorites from SXSW last year. Great flick, but not sure how much wide audience appeal it would have had without a marketing push... it's definitely a film for film/theatre people to love. But I feel like at least it deserved a chance. It is no more unapproachable than Fargo, Baz's Romeo and Juliet, or just about any Lars Von Trier film. It deserved a shot in cinemas.

Subtitles are an interesting topic. My favorite films in our summer series this year are almost all foreign language films, playing in the smaller theatre.

"Reading" while watching a movie has never been a turn off for me, but that is not true of the general US audience. But maybe it's time to be more willing to book international releases, cause I can't tell you how many people put a movie on at home with captions rolling and keep the sound off or low enough to have conversations over. A horrible movie watching experience if you ask me, but at least proves people are not utterly opposed to the idea of reading text anymore.

Maybe there is room for the exhibition model to reverse itself one day? Things go to stream first where they build a following... and then they get cinema bookings because so many would want to see them again on the big screen. That model certainly still works with the classics, why not with more recent stuff? I guess it only will work with streamed releases if anyone sees them to begin with, and they don't just fall into the platform UI black hole and be subjected to the whims of the "algorithms" to appear on someone's landing page. The interface on any given streaming service just isn't "big enough" to give justice to the quantity of worthy films being produced. It's like peering through an keyhole trying to take in the entirety of the roman coliseum.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Our local art-house cinema just won the price for "best European art-house cinema of the year", compared to the multiplex at the other side of the road, they're actually showing movies to people, not just empty rooms. They could also afford a 4K laser upgrade without breaking the bank...

They used to be located in some old school building, everything there was shitty and minimalistic, watching a 3 hour indy production without interval on something that essentially amounted to a wooden plank was often a painful experience. They moved to a new location a few years back and build some rooms that actually look and behave like decent cinema auditoriums, with descent seating, screen sizes and audio, not unlike the multiplex across the street. Ever since then, stuff seems to work out pretty well for them.

Sure, they're not located in some small rural town and having lots of international students around certainly helps a lot, but it ain't Los Angeles around here either, so there certainly IS a market for "alternative movies", I'd say, when it comes down to exhibition, it seems to be more lucrative right now than showing Hollywood's god-awful semi-auto-generated "content" (god, I've started to HATE that word).

You can say that those alternative movies lack some essential marketing. That may be the case, but if you're not bound to 2-week exclusivity windows, then word-of-mouth is a pretty strong argument: it's by far the most effective form of marketing AND it's pretty cheap too. Also, the kind of people that come to visit those movies tend to be, let's say, more sophisticated. They probably prefer a coffee, a beer or a wine instead of popcorn and a soda, but there's some pretty margin to be made here too.

One problem is that "alternative movies" still have this "art house" smell to them, but just like Ryan indicated, there is a lot of accessible fare out there, not just for the hardened alternative movie buff. It's often in different languages than English, I guess that can be a problem in markets where subtitles are considered a pest. Given the tiny local market around here, everybody here grew up with subtitles, they are a second nature. I can understand how they can be seen as distracting, but embracing them could open a whole new world. Not everything that Bollywood produces is awful, for example. Koreans are actually not all that bad at making movies. Heck, even the Germans sometimes are capable of producing pretty watchable stuff, there's quite a lot happening outside of Hollywood and the good thing is: Most of those movies are original productions.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Louise and I go to the movies once or twice a week. This week, we saw Run Lola Run (which we also saw back in 1999) and Evil Does Not Exist. Both great!

Outside the US, are theaters showing more non-Hollywood movies? There's a lot of great stuff (non-super-hero) from all over.

[Ryan Gallagher]

If one were free of limited run exclusivity windows, and dabbling in all the other fare that is out there. I would speculate a better word of mouth marketing model would be to book a "rotation of films". Like when people "had to" because they only had one screen.

Instead of X number of screens showing X runs per day of the same movie. You have say 5 time slots, each screen will show 5 different movies each day, and the slot shifts by one each day. If you can only see a movie after work then you just wait for the day for it to appear in your preferred slots. By the time you hit Friday and Saturday and Sunday Matinee times you know which ones are performing well and can add/remove screens as needed.

Film AAA would only get shown 5 times in that 5 day span, as opposed to 5 times in 1 day under the current model. And the more screens you have available the more "varied" you could make your offerings during the period between bigger blockbusters, instead of just picking one or two big movies and putting it on way too many screens played to nearly empty rooms.

Doing something like this would permit any given film to be "at the venue" for longer, even though only screening a similar number of times to short exclusives. And it's that long time tail that is needed to allow room for the word of mouth hype to do it's job and bring people in.

I think it's that "variety" that would help rebuild a venue's reputation as a "place to experience film", not just a place to go see whatever speculative blockbuster Hollywood has churned out.

But ignore me, cause I certainly don't do that side of the business for a living. ;-)

[Ryan Gallagher]

The warm body math also sort of makes sense. If you are surviving off a dwindling loyal base of film-goers, give them MORE movies to see at your venue, not less but bigger ones. Exclusives on lots of screens are great when they draw in people beyond your regulars. But your regulars are only gonna see that movie once during the exclusive. Meanwhile it's potentially blocking them out of your venue for the rest of the exclusivity period.

Hell, depending on your market. You could probably dedicate one screen to entirely horror (new and retro), and another to sci-fi similarly... and those screens would out-perform the rest (taken on average).

Edit to add: There is likely a certain tipping point where we have to stop booking for mass appeal anyway, because the masses have already stopped coming to cinemas. Why keep catering to an audience that is not attending. At some point the only ones left will be film-buffs, in which case you can book as daring as you like.

[Ryan Gallagher]

I sat in the audience for "In the Mood for Love" and "2046" today... it was a surprisingly young crowd. Overheard enough conversations to convince me that the cinemas these folks are excited about are NOT the hollywood multiplexes. They were a buzz about trying out any new single screen project that was out there, that had creative programming. Drive ins, old-arcade cinemas connected to youth complexes, and thankfully still our summer series.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I think it's that "variety" that would help rebuild a venue's reputation as a "place to experience film", not just a place to go see whatever speculative blockbuster Hollywood has churned out.

Like you probably already experienced yourself, with most independents, it's not very hard to come to an agreement. Most of them are actually happy somebody is actually playing their stuff. As soon as big studios are involved in the distribution, stuff starts to become complicated. I'm still not sure what those studios think they're accomplishing by locking in some movie for 3 weeks on "the biggest screen", while it's probably already available for streaming after week 2, but it has since become clear to me that those people don't operate in the same reality we do. They still think they're creating "value" this way, although all your value starts leaking down the drain as soon as it hits streaming...

But what amazes me is that there seem to be alternate forms of licensing out there, look for example at this particular concept, called The Anything. It's a bunch of tiny screening rooms you can rent for a movie via an app. They don't just let you choose from "old stuff", you can watch current releases, like Furiosa or the latest Bad Boys movie in there, just right now. This is a clear indication Hollywood licenses their "first run" also on an on-demand basis.

[Ryan Gallagher]

But what amazes me is that there seem to be alternate forms of licensing out there, look for example at this particular concept, called The Anything. It's a bunch of tiny screening rooms you can rent for a movie via an app. They don't just let you choose from "old stuff", you can watch current releases, like Furiosa or the latest Bad Boys movie in there, just right now. This is a clear indication Hollywood licenses their "first run" also on an on-demand basis.

Maybe there are markets where Hollywood makes exceptions, The Anything is a fun concept and slick app (3 locations in The Netherlands).

I don't know how common it is but at least some Luxury AV installers in the USA appear to market the ability to build you a home DCI cinema you can book new releases to (at the expected $$$$ price). So another example of alternative licensing. Other more budget outfits simply cite the latest streamable releases, the wait time for of course improved during covid.

http://https://dsilt.com/about-us/blog/how-to-watch-the-latest-hollywood-releases-in-your-home-theater

Maybe the trick is if your cinema business has a "concept" about it's bookings, the bigger studios are more willing to fit within that concept rather than be excluded entirely?

[Bobby Henderson]

The Summer Movie Season is indeed off to a very bad start. I don't think it's necessarily because the big budget entries kicking off this summer are terrible. They're not any worse in quality than so many previous years of re-makes, sequels, re-boots, etc. The difference now is far fewer people are showing up to theaters to see these kinds of movies.

The four biggest productions so far this season all had positive Rotten Tomatoes scores. The first three earned "certified fresh" scores and positive audience scores:
The Fall Guy: 81% Tomatometer Score, 86% Audience Score
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: 90% Tomatometer Score, 90% Audience Score
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: 80% Tomatometer Score, 78% Audience Score
Bad Boys: Ride or Die: 63% Tomatometer Score, 97% Audience Score

I doubt all the blame for this problem has to do with the SAG-AFTRA strike and/or strike by the Writers Guild. The SAG-AFTRA strike definitely ruined much of 2023's business. The strike ended eight months ago. The truth is the situation was already getting bad before the strikes. The real problem is the very short theatrical window. The pandemic gave Hollywood studios the opportunity to radically accelerate the short marketing life cycle of a movie. The hope was making all the money a movie was going to earn, but doing so much faster. Instead it looks like the movies are earning less money in theaters and less money on home platforms too.

I don't have a heck of a lot of hope for upcoming movies like Inside Out 2, Twisters or Despicable Me 4 to do big business even if their TomatoMeter & audience scores knock it out of the park. Lots of industry people have their hopes set on Deadpool & Wolverine doing well. I think that's only going to happen if the movie is a big improvement over Deadpool 2.

The movie industry made it very easy and very cost effective for movie fans to just stay at home. We all have a big-ass TV screen in the living room and have to wait only a few weeks to see a certain new movie on it (if we even want to bother watching that movie).

The pandemic forced a lot of people to have fun only at home and endure that for an extended amount of time. I think a lot of people got used to it and ingrained it as a behavioral pattern. People were already doing more and more of their socializing via electronic screens (phone, tablet, computer). All sorts of delivery services make it possible to only leave the house when you have to go to work. Some people are still working from home. I'm sure these modern habits are a factor in poor ticket sales at the box office.

The economy is a big, current events factor. Some people (elected lawmakers mostly) are claiming the economy is doing just fine. The unemployment rate is still low (May 2024 figure was 4%). Just because someone has "a job" does not mean that person is doing okay financially. A slowing inflation rate does not translate into lower prices either. Prices for so many basic things, like food, are still sky high. Discretionary spending by American consumers is falling off noticeably in response. People are eating out at restaurants less and doing other things for fun less often. It sure looks like that includes visiting movie theaters.

It's worth a shot for a mainstream multiplex theater to play a wider variety of movies, such as "art house" fare. The problem is those movies rarely ever get the marketing push needed to make people out here in "fly-over country" aware the movie even exists. Cinemas that specialize in playing art-house content are typically in bigger city markets and have built-in followings for those kinds of movies. Art-house movies are geared to certain viewer demographics too (college educated, often politically left-leaning, etc).

I don't know what Hollywood studios can do to reverse this situation. Extending the exclusive theatrical release window would be a start. A window of 6 months or longer and sticking to that could help change some of these customer behavior patterns. But audiences are likely sick of all the same kinds of movies Hollywood has been churning out for years. Hollywood was going through a bit of an existential crisis back in the 1960's. People got fed up with all the damned overly long bible epics and musicals. The studios had to start taking chances on new ideas.

[Ryan Gallagher]

The economy is a big, current events factor. Some people (elected lawmakers mostly) are claiming the economy is doing just fine. The unemployment rate is still low (May 2024 figure was 4%). Just because someone has "a job" does not mean that person is doing okay financially. A slowing inflation rate does not translate into lower prices either. Prices for so many basic things, like food, are still sky high. Discretionary spending by American consumers is falling off noticeably in response. People are eating out at restaurants less and doing other things for fun less often. It sure looks like that includes visiting movie theaters.

It's worth a shot for a mainstream multiplex theater to play a wider variety of movies, such as "art house" fare. The problem is those movies rarely ever get the marketing push needed to make people out here in "fly-over country" aware the movie even exists. Cinemas that specialize in playing art-house content are typically in bigger city markets and have built-in followings for those kinds of movies. Art-house movies are geared to certain viewer demographics too (college educated, often politically left-leaning, etc).

Yeah I think that economy point is an often overlooked component of the problem, at least in US markets. The time to go to a cinema (and the money to afford to do so) are in short supply compared to earlier eras where the middle class was a much larger group, and lower income sectors of society were not struggling nearly as much. It's not quite a "luxury" commodity, but it is in danger of becoming one. Wish there was detailed statistics on median income of cinema goers over time compared to the national median. Better content on offer and windows to capitalize on it may not move the needle as much as desired given these economic factors. It probably tracks pretty closely to the number of sit down "restaurant meals" a person/family can afford to have per month.

As for the variety approach. For sure it doesn't favor all regions, especially when films are not marketed enough to be anticipated, but one would hope with the longer booking structures it might permit the more traditional word of mouth marketing to do it's job within a smaller community. It's kind of a Hail Mary approach, once it's established that the audiences you need are not coming for the current fare available, but it has to be tried while a certain critical mass is still attending, below a certain threshold of viewers even excellent word of mouth isn't going to reach enough people, even with extended windows to do so.

Could also experiment with "BYO" and/or "Adult Nights" with a pop-up bar and DJ, if local laws allow such things. And I don't mean adult rated movies, I just mean evenings were Adults can, with intent, go without having to mingle with underage groups and their disturbances. I know plenty of larger museums that implement these things as membership perk events (+ guests), would be interesting trying that model at a cinemaplex. It doesn't solve the economy/access problem though. They are often after-hours events, and cinemas already have late screenings. The goal is show up early and socialize, stay late and socialize, see a movie in the middle. Or make the evening GA and have all screens roll something, people can come and go and sample all the films on offer, if the social aspect takes off as the main attraction, come back for a real screening another day.

Just throwing ideas into the ether. Maybe one of them is good.

[Mike Blakesley]

The real problem is the very short theatrical window.

This is true. The fine folks at NATO were celebratory when the notion of theatrical exclusivity was restored to its rightful place at the beginning of a movie's lifespan, but they also seemed to think that any window length was OK, as long as it didn't end when the movie was still Film-Tech Forums at the boxoffice. So now we have Universal with their idiotic 17-day window for "non-blockbuster" titles, with an endless variety of other windows being out there.

The problem is that ANY movie that gets a short window starts making people think that EVERY movie is going to get a similar short window. By the time two or three weeks goes by and the movie still isn't out on video, they have forgotten about it and moved onto the next thing.

The studios need to return to the idea that a good movie deserves two promotional periods: One for theatrical, and another for home video. This gives them a chance to re-market a movie that underperformed in theatres. By just racing to get it to the home market as fast as possible, they just reinforce the notion that the movie is a flop. Even a movie that was a relative success gets that home-video stink upon it when it's rushed to home video too soon.

Another thing that gets on my nerves is how they shift the advertising over to the home release IMMEDIATELY after the movie hits theaters. On Monday after the opening weekend, all the streaming services are wallpapered with ads for that movie...."available soon." So of course that's going to dampen anyone's enthusiasm for spending bigger bucks on the theatrical experience, in these inflationary times. "Let's skip that one, it'll be on home video 'soon.'"

NATO should stop celebrating, and get serious about restoring the video window to is rightful length of at least 90 to 180 days.

[Bobby Henderson]

It's not quite a "luxury" commodity, but it is in danger of becoming one. Wish there was detailed statistics on median income of cinema goers over time compared to the national median.

The cinema business has depended more on younger adults for as long as I can remember. A great deal of people in their 20's and 30's are struggling pretty bad financially. If you're blowing 60%-70% of your income on rent and surviving on ramen noodles just to be able to move out of mommy and daddy's house you're probably not going to be thinking about visiting a cinema, much less doing too much else for fun.

Movies have typically been made for younger demographic groups, be it little kids, teens or people in their 20's and 30's. Hollywood studios need to realize America's median age is shifting increasingly older. Falling birth rates are going to translate into lower sales for those Disney cartoons in the years ahead. I don't think re-making movies from the 60's, 70's and 80's is a good way to appeal to Boomer and Gen-X customers either. They need to be making stuff that is NEW and yet appeals to those middle aged and older groups.

As for the variety approach. For sure it doesn't favor all regions, especially when films are not marketed enough to be anticipated, but one would hope with the longer booking structures it might permit the more traditional word of mouth marketing to do it's job within a smaller community.

The advertising situation has been hurting movies badly.

Movies don't stay in cinemas long enough for word of mouth response to be effective. Plus there are so many shows on TV and streaming services competing for attention. And then there's social media, YouTube, etc on top of that. Any of that stuff can be seen in HD quality. Any of that stuff can be the topic of conversation around the water cooler. Hollywood movies aren't the only form of entertainment. Hell, I'll even hear a couple of my female co-workers talking about books they're reading.

Decades in the past movie studios could get a lot of advertising bang for their buck running movie commercials on broadcast network TV channels. Not anymore. Nielsen scores show by show and channel by channel are much smaller now due to how fractured the total viewing audience has become. Dozens of magazine publications, including some that catered to the movie industry, have disappeared. Many newspapers have failed. Movie marketing has a lot less physical visibility than it did in the past.

The advertising situation is just as bad, if not worse, for home video. The loss of video rental stores and scores of movie-music-books retail stores took away a huge Point-Of-Purchase (POP) advertising platform for movies. The movies sections in Walmart and Target are a poor substitute for that. I saw an endcap in Walmart loaded with copies of Dune: Part 2. The sight reminded me it can be streamed on MAX. The Blu-ray might have been a bare-bones movie-only disc anyway, so what difference does it make if I watch it again via streaming?

The problem is that ANY movie that gets a short window starts making people think that EVERY movie is going to get a similar short window. By the time two or three weeks goes by and the movie still isn't out on video, they have forgotten about it and moved onto the next thing.

There are many movies released 30 years ago (such as Speed, released on this day back in 1994) that I can clearly remember. I remember plenty of shows that were minor hits or even flops. Movies back then had much more of a physical presence both in marketing and retail visibility. It was easier for them to get burned into our memory. What do we have now? The queue in a streaming app. That's a bottomless abyss where movies that are still new go to die.

[Frank Cox]

The cinema business has depended more on younger adults for as long as I can remember.

Where do the teenagers go on dates now? I used to get a pretty good crowd of teens most weekends and now I don't see many (or any) for most movies. At all. My crowd, such as it is, seems to be 30-and-up now.

I remember plenty of shows that were minor hits or even flops. Movies back then had much more of a physical presence

I was discussing this with one of my customers just the other day. He was telling me about a movie that he had come to see here in the 90's that made a big impression on him, "one of my best memories from being a teenager" he said. I told him to imagine that he had seen that movie on Netflix instead and he said, "Gosh, I really see what you mean here. It wouldn't have been the same at all and I wouldn't have that memory today."