US Box Office Revenue Finally Drops; But Not Because Of Infringement

from the make-better-movies dept

Every year for the past few years, we've been noting that, even as the MPAA whine and cries about "piracy," it's been doing record business at the box office. It's been up, up, up. Until this year. It appears that there's been a rather slight downturn in box office take, though it still exceeded $10 billion. A lot of people are focused on fewer tickets being sold, but the number of tickets is a pretty meaningless measure. What matters is revenue, and that's still strong, if slightly off from its previous highs. But, of course, no business always sets a record.

And what's good here is that it seems most folks involved in the movie business seem to recognize that online infringement has nothing to do with the dropoff in box office revenue this year. Reports are chalking it up to "a combination of a weak economy and expanding home entertainment options." The most thoughtful explanation I've seen comes from Roger Ebert, who puts forth a series of compelling reasons why box office revenue is down, starting with the lack of good quality movies that are "must sees."

The key thing about the reasons he gives? Almost every one is something that the industry could have fixed if it only was smart enough to have a long term strategy.

1. Obviously, the absence of a must-see mass-market movie. When moviegoers hear about "Avatar" or "The Dark Knight," they blast off from home base and land in a theater seat as quickly as they can

Definitely a huge and important point. If you don't make quality films that people want to see, the box office is going to suffer. It seems that the industry has become so risk averse these days, that it keeps churning out rather formulaic pieces -- sequels and reboots, mainly. Sometimes you can do those kinds of movies in amazing ways ("The Dark Knight" is certainly one example), but too frequently these movies seem to rely on their "built in" audience, rather than working to find an audience. So the ticket sales decline.

2. Ticket prices are too high. People have always made that complaint, but historically the movies have been cheap compared to concerts, major league sports and restaurants. Not so much any longer. No matter what your opinion is about 3D, the charm of paying a hefty surcharge has worn off for the hypothetical family of four.

This was bound to happen and there are two reasons for it. The first is that the industry was experimenting with different price points, and when that happens, sooner or later you're going to find the ceiling. That finally happened. I don't think it's wrong that there were experiments with price points, but the industry needs to be careful to avoid continually pushing those boundaries.

The 3D issue is a bigger one. As I've noted in the past, it's good that the industry looked to add value to give people more of a reason to buy. Doing things like 3D films and IMAX films give people good reasons to go to the theaters, rather than watching at home... but in typical Hollywood fashion, they understood the superficial aspect ("ooh, with 3D we can charge more") and ignored the real underlying reasons why it worked ("we have to add real value"). So they just rushed out a bunch of crappy 3D movies where the 3D added no value, and people started rejecting it. As they should. If the industry had focused on real value, rather than just assuming "3D = more money" perhaps this wouldn't be an issue.

3. The theater experience. Moviegoers above 30 are weary of noisy fanboys and girls. The annoyance of talkers has been joined by the plague of cell-phone users, whose bright screens are a distraction. Worse, some texting addicts get mad when told they can't use their cell phones. A theater is reportedly opening which will allow and even bless cell phone usage, although that may be an apocryphal story.

Preaching to the converted here. Some of us have been arguing this point for a decade and are still amazed that the theater owners and the Hollywood studios just don't seem to get it. People go out to the movies because it's a social experience -- with part of the key point being the experience. You can cook your own dinner at home, but people like to eat out at restaurants. What's amazing is just how bad the experience has become, and how little effort most in the industry (with a few notable exceptions!) have made in trying to improve the overall experience. If the theaters and Hollywood actually focused on improving the overall experience, they'd be having much better performance.

4. Refreshment prices. It's an open secret that the actual cost of soft drinks and popcorn is very low. To justify their inflated prices, theaters serve portions that are grotesquely oversized, and no longer offer what used to be a "small popcorn." Today's bucket of popcorn would feed a thoroughbred.

This goes back to number 3, really. The food is a part of the experience. Making it ridiculously overpriced doesn't contribute to the overall experience at all. You can price it reasonably, make a good profit and use that to attract more people to the theater. Or you can do what the theaters do and seek to gouge.

5. Competition from other forms of delivery. Movies streaming over the internet are no longer a sci-fi fantasy. TV screens are growing larger and cheaper. Consumers are finding devices that easily play internet movies through TV sets. Netflix alone accounts for 30% of all internet traffic in the evening. That represents millions of moviegoers. They're simply not in a theater. This could be seen as an argument about why newspapers and their readers need movie critics more than ever; the number of choices can be baffling.

I'd argue it goes beyond just other forms of delivery, to competition from other forms of entertainment. The wider internet has grown quite a bit over the past few years, and video games, in particular, have become a much, much, much bigger industry. Plenty of people who might have wanted to go out to see a movie in the past, might prefer to just stay home and play video games online instead.

6. Lack of choice. Box-office tracking shows that the bright spot in 2011 was the performance of indie, foreign or documentary films. On many weekends, one or more of those titles captures first-place in per-screen average receipts. Yet most moviegoers outside large urban centers can't find those titles in their local gigantiplex. Instead, all the shopping center compounds seem to be showing the same few over-hyped disappointments. Those films open with big ad campaigns, play a couple of weeks, and disappear.

This is also a big one that gets very little attention, unfortunately. It's typical Hollywood thinking though. They're driven solely by the hits, and have never understood the value of solid movies that can make a profit without being a blockbuster. We're not even talking about the full long tail here, but anything beyond the "short head." If Hollywood would stop thinking in terms of finding only the "big hits," and actually looked at how to make profitable movies, they'd do things pretty differently. Unfortunately, that's just not how they think.

All in all, I believe the movie industry will eventually figure this out, though it may take some outsiders and fresh thinking, rather than today's studio bosses. Unfortunately, in the short term, we're likely to hear the MPAA and others pretend that the decline has something to do with "piracy," when there's little (if any) evidence to support that.

Filed Under: box office, movies, roger ebert

Roger Ebert Points People To The 'Ebert-Edit' Of Psycho On The Pirate Bay

from the celeb-endorsements dept

Ever thought you'd see Roger Ebert endorsing a "pirated" movie found on The Pirate Bay? Keith alerts us to an Ebert tweet, in which he states, that he's "opposed to piracy," but still links to a fan edit of Psycho, noting that it "proves a point." You see, Ebert has said for a while that he thinks Hitchcock screwed up the ending of Psycho:

For thoughtful viewers, however, an equal surprise is still waiting. That is the mystery of why Hitchcock marred the ending of a masterpiece with a sequence that is grotesquely out of place. After the murders have been solved, there is an inexplicable scene during which a long-winded psychiatrist (Simon Oakland) lectures the assembled survivors on the causes of Norman's psychopathic behavior. This is an anticlimax taken almost to the point of parody.

If I were bold enough to reedit Hitchcock's film, I would include only the doctor's first explanation of Norman's dual personality: "Norman Bates no longer exists. He only half existed to begin with. And now, the other half has taken over, probably for all time." Then I would cut out everything else the psychiatrist says, and cut to the shots of Norman wrapped in the blanket while his mother's voice speaks ("It's sad when a mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son..."). Those edits, I submit, would have made "Psycho" very nearly perfect. I have never encountered a single convincing defense of the psychiatric blather; Truffaut tactfully avoids it in his famous interview.

While Ebert wasn't actually so bold, in this day and age, anyone can edit a movie (not necessarily legally), and someone took up Ebert's challenge, and made exactly that fan edit and put it up on The Pirate Bay, leading to Ebert's tweet.

Of course, in this day and age, with Twitter potentially suspending accounts of users who link to websites that link to content that might sorta kinda be deemed infringing, he should be careful. And, of course, let's not forget that the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division these days seems to believe that a mere link to infringing content could be enough to file criminal charges.

And yet... most of us with any sense of perspective knows that this is crazy. No one is "harmed" by allowing someone to take Ebert's suggestion and create a fan edit of the movie. It's not likely that anyone is going to download and watch that and decide they don't need to watch the real version. If anything, it may make people interested in comparing. And, realistically speaking, the only people likely to watch the fan edit are those who were already fans of the original. So what harm has it done?

Filed Under: fan edit, psycho, roger ebert
Companies: the pirate bay

Facebook, Roger Ebert And The Pointlessness Of The Jerk Patrol

from the it-doesn't-work dept

There's been a lot of talk recently about issues concerning "corporate censorship" after Facebook shut down Roger Ebert's page, supposedly because some people complained about his comments (on Twitter, not Facebook) concerning a death, which some took offense to. A lot of people are jumping on the "censorship" bandwagon, and part of it makes me wonder if we need a different word. When a private company "censors," it's quite different from when a government "censors," and using the same word often leads to confusion.

But, perhaps a larger point of this is how private companies now have tremendous say over what speech they will and will not allow. That's legal, but it leads to a certain arbitrariness, as was demonstrated here, with many people thinking Facebook went too far. The company later tried to claim it was a "mistake," but not many people seem to believe that.

However, I think where this gets more interesting is in raising a separate issue: the total pointlessness and arbitrariness of the "jerk patrol." Some people apparently disliked Ebert's comments. That's fair enough, but does a few "offended" people mean he should lose his account? That's what makes lots of people quite uncomfortable. As it should. And yet, as all of this is happening, there are all these efforts to try to criminalize being a "jerk" online. But, as this little kerfuffle shows, what is and what is not "a jerk" or "offensive" is totally subjective, in most cases, and offending one person is hardly a reason to take action against the speaker. It's too bad that Facebook doesn't seem to recognize that, but it's even scarier when governments pass laws without understanding it.

Filed Under: censorship, jerks, roger ebert, terms of service
Companies: facebook

Twitter Is Like A Casual Conversation Among Friends Over Dinner

from the that's-it dept

I've noticed that whenever we mention Twitter on this site, we inevitably get some snarky comment from someone about how useless Twitter is. It often seems to come from someone with a "been there/done that" attitude, but it really comes off quite like the folks who used to mock mobile phones as being useless, email as being useless, the web as being useless and blogs as being useless. The fact is many, many, many people find all those things quite valuable, and these days you don't hear so many complaints about phones, email and the web being useless (you still sometimes hear people talking about blogs being useless). One of the most common put downs of Twitter is that "I don't care about someone eating a tuna sandwich for lunch." And, indeed, most people don't. But if all you follow are people whose tuna sandwich lunches you don't care about, you're not using the tool correctly.

Roger Ebert has been using Twitter quite a lot lately, and he came to it after being one of the Twitter-haters (like many people are), and he's now written eloquently about how he realized his initial thoughts on the service were wrong:

I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi. I said I feared I would become addicted. I was correct.

Now, part of that is the fact that he has lost his voice, which has made it difficult for him to have good face-to-face conversations, something that he can do on Twitter. And it's that aspect of it that made him realize what a useful service it is:

I am in conversation. When you think about it, Twitter is something like a casual conversation among friends over dinner: Jokes, gossip, idle chatter, despair, philosophy, snark, outrage, news bulletins, mourning the dead, passing the time, remembering favorite lines, revealing yourself.

A bunch of people sent this story over, and initially I wasn't sure if there was anything to say about it. But those few lines above so accurately describe the value of Twitter that it seemed worthwhile to post. I know it won't convince those who still see no need for the service, or those who feel the need to immediately put it down without additional thought, but for those who have found the service to be useful, the point Ebert makes above is what makes it so valuable. For me, personally, I've found that those sorts of "conversations" have allowed me to stay much more in touch with friends and family around the world, while also making new friends and acquaintances along the way. It really is just an ongoing conversation, and in a world where conversation matters (as I believe it does now, more than ever), the tools that make conversation easier are too important to simply brush aside as useless.

Filed Under: conversation, roger ebert, twitter
Companies: twitter

Roger Ebert Gives People A Reason To Buy

from the after-connecting-with-fans-for-so-long dept

Last month, we wrote about Esquire's incredibly moving profile of Roger Ebert as part of our discussion of a segment of that article concerning Disney taking down the video of the tribute show for Gene Siskel that Ebert did right after his longtime sparring partner passed away. If you liked the Esquire piece, you should also check out Will Leitch's touching personal story about Roger Ebert, which shows how incredibly nice Ebert had been to Leitch very early on in Leitch's career (and how Leitch screwed it up in a regretfully rebellious moment).

What comes through in both pieces is how utterly nice and decent Ebert seems to be. After the Leitch piece ran, Ebert tweeted to Leitch that "all is forgiven." For decades, tons of people have connected with Ebert through his old television show, and through his movie reviews, blogs and columns. More recently, he's been connecting in a big way via Twitter as well.

And now he's trying something different. He's giving his fans a reason to buy. While we often talk about the whole CwF+RtB business model in the context of replacing traditional models -- such as for music, books and movies, it can clearly work in other areas as well. Our own curiosity led us to try setting up our own CwF+RtB offering -- which was a fantastic success (and, yes, we know we need to replenish and offer more -- hold on, it's coming).

So we're always glad to see others jumping on the bandwagon and trying similar ideas as well. In Ebert's case, it's The Ebert Club, which is a yearly subscription that grants you additional access and benefits for a mere $5. A lot of what you get is available for free, but there are some good scarcities in there -- including private discussion threads and early access to special Ebertfest events including a special meet-and-greet with Ebert himself.

It sounds like they're looking to do more as well, so it will be interesting to see what comes of it. There aren't any tiers -- it's one price fits all -- though I could see room for a tiered offering down the road as well with additional benefits (private film screenings with just club members?). But what it's really showing is that this whole concept of connecting with fans and giving them a real (scarce) reason to buy goes beyond what you might expect -- and opens up all sorts of new possibilities elsewhere as well. And, considering that Leitch's "falling out" with Ebert was over Ebert being the king of "old media," this sort of venture seems very, very new media.

Filed Under: cwf+rtb, fan club, roger ebert, scarcities, subscription

Disney's Takedown Of Roger Ebert's Tribute To Gene Siskel

from the shameful dept

Esquire's moving article about famed film critic Roger Ebert is worth reading for many reasons -- detailing the unfortunate medical circumstances that have caused him to lose his voice, his jaw and his ability to eat, among other things, but not his ability to communicate or share his love of movies. Reading through the article, I had no intention of writing anything about it for Techdirt, but then I came to a story near the end, also noticed by Justin Levine, concerning how Disney apparently forced offline Ebert's first show after longtime sparring partner Gene Siskel died:

Ebert keeps scrolling down [to his blog post commemorating Siskel, ten years after his death]. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: "Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted." Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what's happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it's not sadness surfacing. He's shaking. It's anger.

Chaz looks over his shoulder at the screen. "Those fu -- " she says, catching herself.

They think it's Disney again -- that they've taken down the videos. Terms-of-use violation.

This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn't press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they're just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he's still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he's shouting now. He's standing outside on the street corner and he's arching his back and he's shouting at the top of his lungs.

Notice that they think it's Disney again. How nice of them to repeatedly take down the videos of Ebert's tribute to his close friend. Just like copyright law intended.

Filed Under: copyright, gene siskel, roger ebert, tributes
Companies: disney

Copyright Once Again Being Used To Hinder Culture, Not Enable It

from the so-many-sad-stories dept

I'm still working my way through James Boyle's excellent The Public Domain, but it's chock full of examples of ways that copyright holds back cultural expression -- and that comes to mind in reading the saga of a movie called Sita Sings the Blues. It was brought to my attention by Rich W, who saw the film at a film festival a while back and loved it. After that, the film disappeared off the radar, but was brought back to some attention right before Christmas, when Roger Ebert wrote a glowing review of it. He, like Rich, didn't expect to like it, and didn't even plan to watch it -- but after being convinced to check it out, he loved it. But, what he discovered is that the film was unlikely to get any distribution because, despite being an animated reimagining of a classic Indian love story, it uses the songs of popular jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, recorded in the 1920s.

To clear the rights for the music, apparently more money than the entire movie cost was required. As Ebert noted:

"Don't the copyright owners realize they are contributing to the destruction of their property by removing it from knowledge?"

Exactly. Meanwhile, the creator of the film, Nina Paley, has been actively blogging about the ordeal. The attention brought about by Ebert's endorsement has resulted in the copyright holders lowering their demands, but including some pretty onerous strings that will make it nearly impossible for her to ever profit from the movie (from which she's already in debt). Basically, if she actually sells copies of the movie, she'll owe a lot more -- but that doesn't apply to promotional copies of the movie. In response, she's worked out a convoluted plan, whereby she'll pay the awful initial fees, but, knowing she'll never get direct profits from it, she's working hard to free the film up as much as possible -- by putting the entire movie up as a "promotion" on the Internet Archive, while putting it under some sort of open and free license.

From there, she goes on to list out a whole bunch of ways that she hopes to still make money, indirectly, from the success of the movie -- even as she's going into further debt to pay off the music copyright holders. Many of her suggestions for business models will sound quite familiar to folks around here (ancillary products, special limited edition signed products, sponsorships, etc.). It's a shame she needs to go to these levels just to pay off the copyright holders on these compositions from nearly a century ago -- who would only be helped by the success of this movie. Hopefully the other business models she's testing out will be able to cover those costs, but she's already in a deep hole, which is a huge shame. Of course, at the same time, this experience appears to have turned her into something of a convert when it comes to understanding the damages brought about by copyright. Separate from the movie, she's decided to copyleft an old comic she created years ago (though, she's asking for help to get them online).

Filed Under: annette hanshaw, copyright, movies, music, nina paley, roger ebert

AP Gets It Wrong Again: Wants To Restrict Certain Reports To 500 Words

from the you're-not-bloggers dept

It seems that the Associated Press continues to struggle to figure out how to deal with this whole online thing. It's still trying to revamp its pricing structure after a bunch of newspapers canceled their contracts as they were pretty pissed off that the AP is effectively competing with its own member papers. The AP has also had a bit of a run-in with bloggers over its ridiculous fair use policies. Its latest move seems to, once again, be getting pretty much everything backwards. Famed film critic Roger Ebert is complaining that the AP has sent down word from on-high that all entertainment articles must be 500 words or shorter -- including film reviews, interviews, news stories, trend pieces and (best of all) "think pieces." Apparently, if you need more than 500 words to get people thinking, you're a bit too verbose. On top of that, the AP is asking those same entertainment writers to focus on more salacious, attention grabbing stories in picking what to write.

It's not difficult to see what's going on here. The AP is trying to be more "bloggy." Shorter, more attention grabbing pieces? Apparently, it's decided that people online only want to read the quick hits on salacious stories. Of course, despite what some may think, that's not really true. The AP has an opportunity to be better than all of that. It could draw serious attention by creating real content that people want, rather than running after the latest fad. But, apparently, that's not in the AP's plan. It has the resources to do what various small-time blogs can't do, but apparently, it's going in the other direction. Perhaps it's not too surprising, but it's no less a mistake.

Yes, short, attention grabbing stories get traffic, but that doesn't mean good, thorough journalism would get ignored. The problem the AP is having isn't that its stories are too long, or not attention-grabbing enough. It's that it still views itself as a gatekeeper of information, rather than an enabler of both news gathering and news distribution. Of course, with each misstep by the AP, others are quickly moving in to take its place.

Filed Under: blogging, entertainment, reporting, roger ebert
Companies: associated press