Friday the 13th weekend 2020
I’ve received a lot of very smart questions about my fatwa on (exclusively) digitally marketed films, so I thought I would write a little more about it today, and try to explain why TV is still important.
It’s not that I think digital is bad, it just can’t get the job done (in a meaningful way) on its own, here’s why. Digital marketing is ‘opt in’, meaning it’s very difficult to get someone to watch something online unless they are drawn to it to begin with. Because you have to opt in, and for movies you need more than a couple of seconds to get the idea across in a meaningful way, the only moviegoers that watch are people you’re probably getting already. Just like everything online, it’s just pinging around in it’s own bubble. So it can grow the seed, but it can’t plant it very well. For TV, it’s the flip side, it’s an ‘opt out’ proposition. Since it runs without you fast forwarding through it, you have to opt out of seeing it, and even fast forwarding through it might show you enough that you may pause to see what’s up. Because you’re dealing with 30 and in some cases 60 second pieces of marketing materials, you have a better shot at planting a seed.
Why is this important? I believe that moviegoing, just like everything else outside the home, is a social event. You’ll go if someone invites you, or vice versa, or if you’ve got a bunch of friends going you jump on board; but it’s a group social thing. And unless those non avid fans (of a particular film) aren’t at least moderately interested or even moderately aware, it’s a pass for them. For example, for those of you who are in the marketing sector we’ve all had the following exchange happen. If you’re talking to one of your civilian friends and they ask you ‘what are you working on?”, and you reply with a title that you’ve been slaving away on and it should be right in your civilian friends wheelhouse, they reply with a blank look and say those terrifying two words….. ‘what’s that?’……and you want to go kill yourself. So to expand on that idea, let’s say that civilian friend of yours is invited by their moviegoing friend to see something, and the reply to them is ‘what’s that?’, the whole excursion is in jeopardy. That’s why it’s important to spend money in places other than the fan centric digital bubble, and we just haven’t cracked the code on how to plant the seed the way you can plant it with the ‘opt out’ metric of TV advertising. Now you’ll hear over and over again that TV ads are just ’so expensive and inefficient’, which is a very valid point; but until we find a way to replace it we’ve got to suck it up and accept that it’s necessary. That’s why I keep referencing the TV spend, it’s what separates the films that are doing better than others because less of the invited friends are saying ‘what’s that?’. Anyway, with the usual accuracy and dependability of a Trump voter fraud lawsuit, here’s my take on some new openings this weekend.
*Freaky *- Opened on 2500 screens with some pretty good reviews, and might be one of the better playing films we’ve seen since the Covid restart. They spent some decent TV money, about 60% of what something like New Mutants spent a while back so it looks a little better than the recent openings right now. Right now it’s running about 50% better than Come Play looked two weeks ago; and since it’s Friday the 13th today and Come Play was on Halloween weekend, that should comp out fairly closely.
Ammonite - Went 280 theaters on the way to a VOD release, and just like the other upscale films we’ve seen since the Covid restart, missing NY and LA is a very big deal. There are some decent grosses (considering) in markets like Boston and Austin, but this shouldn’t add up to much this weekend.