Movie Industry Blames Texting for Bad Box Office 1197
cybercuzco writes "The movie industry is blaming poor sales of such movies as Gigli, The Hulk and Charlies Angels not on the fact that they were poor quality, but because people text message other people telling them that the movie stinks. Industry executives say that this undermines a carefully crafted marketing image. Expect texting to be banned by the MPAA in the near future."
This is grand (Score:5, Interesting)
Here, eat some of this shit. Don't tell anyone that it tastes like... well, shit. Our business model, you ask? As follows:
- Produce crap.
- Hope enough suckers buy it before it's categorized as crap.
- Profit!!!
Yes, I think we just figured out step #2. Impressive!This is just pathetic. I think it's even worse than the telephone marketers complaining about how they're livelyhood is gone because they can't piss people off whenever they want to.
Oh yeah, this "industry" is going down the drain faster than I thought. I hope it dies a fast, painful death, along with the music "industry".
Free Speech? (Score:2, Interesting)
Too damned bad for the MPAA. Maybe the public has finally found the "killer-app" that will stop the flood of garbage coming out of the industry.
("Freddy vs. Jason"? For fuck's sake...)
Re:Okay.... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Five years ago, when summer movies were arguably just as bad as they are now..."
and
"No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that."
Though I think for these executives a foot-in-mouth icon might serve better.
Re:Hrrmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, they're breaking sales records, but interest and population are usually growing. That means that if they weren't becoming more efficient or better in their business, with the passage of time you'd expect them to break sales records anyway. For example, look at the number of admissions on blockbusters from 15-20 years ago and today. The disparity is ridiculous.
The movie business is just that - a business. Given their perspective on things (cold hard capitalism) sometimes the things that they do and say can seem strange. (I can imagine a plausible announcement: Microsoft is *disappointed* that they only made a couple of billion during sales period X. Relatively, that's lousy)
So then let's ban...... (Score:2, Interesting)
What brings so much humour into my life is how these "industry groups" seem to be like little 5 year olds - willing to talk about everything but the truth and adamantly sticking to their POVs. Music sales aren't down because of Kazaa - it's cuz I wanna buy the Matrix DVD instead of spending 15$ on a CD with two good songs.
I love their business model, though. Make crappy stuff and then blame everything but it's crappiness for the fact that it doesn't sell. Then sue everyone because they won't buy a crappy product.
Who thinks these things up?!
Bad article - read the orginal for more details (Score:5, Interesting)
Predicting the Actions of the "Massess" (Score:3, Interesting)
After the advertising blitz before Spiderman helped send it to super blockbuster status, the movie execs thought they had a formula to make any movie into a super mega hit, at least for 1 weekend. After all, movie execs are investing a chunk of change into these movies, they want to be able to predict and control the behavior of the masses accurately, at least in the short term. What they didn't figure into their calculation was the Spiderman was, thanks to Sam Rami, a pretty good movie.
New communications technology is giving people greater power, and that is scaring the pants off those who use to be able to spoon feed us information and entertainment. I say, let's watch them squirm and laugh.
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Interesting)
"New Coke" is distributed just long enough to exhaust existing stock of old Coke. Everyone hates it.
Coca-cola Classic comes around and tastes more like the actual original Coke, even though it isn't quite the same. The public adores it for NOT being New Coke.
A brilliant marketing triumph. It's so evil I'm getting goosebumps.
My Big Fat Greek Text Message (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, a simple non-disclosure agreement on the back of each ticket will thwart those who dare bad-mouth any movie. Just patent the plot and claim copyright over any description of the story.
Re:Hrrmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
The Hulk wasn't.
What could the moral of this story possibly be? I can't figure it out.
Couldn't be the cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
That wasn't a showstopper for me, but, after paying that and THEN being treated to a trailer with a gaffer who claims that "film piracy" take food off his table, well, that was the last straw for me. That was my last entry into a first run house, with one possible exception: There's a film coming out this winter that I've waited all my life to see. After that, I doubt I will ever subject myself to a first run cinema. And Hollywood have themselves, not me, to blame. I remained a customer through the DMCA, through the Valenti years, and until now. But that was the absolute last straw, to make me pay for the privilege of being lied to and called a theif.
Re:Hrrmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
When the remake of Godilla was made the director was told to make the film the way he wanted to as the company execs knew how they would make a profit, by selling stuff and building it up before anyone had even seen the film.
James
Precident for banning criticism (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree -- it's just a matter of time.
Look how far we've come. Twenty years ago, legalese was rare at the consumer level. Now, it seems like packaging and advertising for every conceivable consumer product includes micro-print disclaimers wordsmithed by a small army of attorneys. As a consumer, you have to question everything and jealously guard your privacy during every interaction with retailers. Our culture is being damaged from this insane structure.
I think that banning commentary is a natural extention of where we are right now. Think about it -- it's not unusual for companies to ban the publishing of benchmark testing results as part of their EULA. *cough*DOTNET*cough* This amounts to a banning of criticism, because it prohibits this dissemination of information, particularly those with objective measures.
How long before the MPAA prints something to the effect of "By purchasing and redeeming this movie ticket, you agree to the terms of usage as published at http://www.WeOwnYou.com which may change at any time, without further notice"? Of course, the "agreement" will prohibit the moviegoer from communicating any opinion to a third party regarding the content of the film with the advance written permission of the studio, lest it harm precious sales.
I didn't see T3, and I didn't even get a sms (Score:2, Interesting)
Shame on you for missing the chance of telling a great story. I will also be careful to avoid movies in the future made by the same persons.
I'll be back!!
Uhmm,, no,,,, no I don't think so.
Re:The Movie Stinks -- you miss the point. (Score:2, Interesting)
Film License Agreement (Score:2, Interesting)
Sort of along the lines of the Bose tactics w/r/t their audio equipment. Sue the audiophile magazines for informing their readers of the sub-optimal quality of the Bose products. Now that the RIAA is going after the individual consumers, it's time for other *IAs to go after them too!
Texting WHILE watching The Hulk pissed me off... (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess it's better than whispering back and forth...
Movie EULA (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't even see the irony (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that fast-communicating audiences are "scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns" doesn't register to the movie moguls as MAKE BETTER MOVIES. Talk about living in your own pocket universe.
Re:Yep (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hrrmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
This is another example of how the MPAA will not evolve/adjust to the new communications/internet world. Why are the paying in excess of $20 million for stars that are overpaid, overqualify media whores (i.e. Gigli stars)???
And don't tell me there are not perfect examples of this already working out there! What about Big Fat Greek Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, and my personal favorite this year 28 Days Later. Made on a budjet of $8.7 million with previously unheard of actors AND with digital cameras! Not to mention actually paying a little extra for a good script from a good writer (Alex Garland).
In fact one studio is already doing just what I have said so maybe they are learning: Strategy of FOX Searchlight [nymetro.com]
Re:The Movie Stinks (Score:5, Interesting)
The best movie of the season was almost certainly Finding Nemo, which was 100% CGI.
The worst movie of the season was almost certainly Gigli, which I don't think had any CGI at all.
Oops!
D
Awww, pooor poor MPAA baby.... waaaaaah.... (Score:1, Interesting)
At least that's what it sounded like to me...
Earth to MPAA/RIAA/Whatever: WE, THE PUBLIC, able to exercise our purchasing power in the most efficient ways possible, do hereby state and affirm that we will no longer be subjecated by your Ministries of Deception (Advertising Departments). We will no longer spend our hard earned cash on CRAP.
If what you're producing is NO GOOD, we're going to tell everyone we know to stay home and save their money...
Moral: We don't want continual releases of the same rehashed BOHICA shit. Make something new. Make it cool. Make it worth watching. Price it at $5 per ticket - hell, I'll probably see it twice. Price the DVD at $12-$15 and I'll buy it. Add some cool stuff and I'll pay ya $20 if it's cool enough. Price the sound track at $3-$5 and I'll buy that too. Put it on pay per view for $2.00 and if I haven't bought the DVD yet - I just might be tempted to do so...
OR, keep up your schenagganins and we'll put your collective dicks in the dirt just like those morons at the RIAA...
Re:addendum: (Score:5, Interesting)
Word of mouth generally takes time, even when spread via SMS. The stinkier the movie, the faster word spreads, even before the advent of cell phones much less texting.
Our friends the MPAA/RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
My take on this.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Facts:
- Movies now have approx 20 minutes of previews.
- Movie ticket prices have sky rocketed over the last couple years - 8$ where I am now. (you can buy some DVDs for this price...and OWN the movie)
- Movie theatres have not increased the quality in service that they provide - we still have projection based movies, in stadium (at best) style seating.
- Movie makers spend millions on marketing for many movies, including the ones mentioned in the article above - posters, TV spots, talk show host appearances, toys, food, and many more.
Conflict: Given these facts, it is safe to extrapolate that movie goers have a lot to put up with in order to see a movie. Final conclusion: spending X million dollars on marketing does NOT ensure a block buster hit, when you take into consideration other factors of the movie going experience. Recommendations: Lower the ticket price Remove ads from movies that received negative test screen results Create more consistently "better" movies (certainly a moving target here)Slow them down (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe the theater owners will install cell phone jammers to at least slow down the instant messagers. That would have the benefit (for me) of not having idiots take calls during a movie.
Re:addendum: (Score:1, Interesting)
Disclaimer: I haven't seen Gigli, and I probably won't. Bad movie? Probably from the sounds of it? Worst movie of ALL TIME? Hardly.
Re:Communication a problem? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have spent many years in the marketing biz, and you do have a point. My job is to push the buttons necessary to get customers to buy. Its not my job to give a 100% accurate description of the product so the consumer can decide. This is balanced with the fact that I MUST be factual in how I describe. (really)
This is why colas sell 'image' instead of 'this cola tastes good', for instance. Its called 'selling the sizzle, not the steak', and is pretty much 101 in marketing. If I am selling winter coats, for instance, I don't show you how warm you will be, I show you how good you might look, how others are impressed with your good taste in clothes, and maybe, just maybe, girls will flock to you because you are now so cool. I didn't say anything about how warm it makes you, so if the wind cuts through it like a hot knife through butter, then I have not lied.
BTW, its good to have a healthy disrespect for your own industry (which I do) but it is the CONSUMER'S job to make sure its the right product for them. So yes, a company that makes bad 'coats' doesn't want anyone to know that. The problem is, the MPAA's head is too big for its own good, and they seem to blame the people who bought their product and discovered it sucked and it hasn't lived up to their expectations. The customer is the problem, and their text messaging is clearly interfering with their marketing, so they blame (and virtually lash out) against them. This is the SCO way of doing things.
Personally, I don't worry about it too much. The MPAA seems perfectly capable of shooting themselves in the foot, and as long as they blame the sorry customers for not enjoying the movie, then they are sealing their own fate. Fortunately, movies are a very profitable industry, and I have high hopes that some studios will work to fill the void, so this lull in movie quality won't last forever. Meanwhile, this blame game serves to reduce the influence of the MPAA with the public, creating more resentment. With high bandwidth, faster computers, new software and P2P as strong as ever, they make it more likely that people will steal movies rather than buy them, because they feel no sorrow for anything related to the MPAA.
Re:this movie stinks (Score:3, Interesting)
The movies are getting worse but not the whole prb (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The Movie Stinks (Score:5, Interesting)
This hope may not be justified. A generation ago the first three Star Wars movies did spectacularly well on the strength of the special effects and CGI. It certainly wasn't the acting (which was barely adequate), the story (which was trite and hackneyed) or anything else of the sort. It was that George Lucas could put his personal vision on the screen exactly as he imagined it.
Close to thirty years later he is still doing that. But the movies aren't making the same kind of money because people are used to the pretty lights. Once they see past them it is apparent that Lucas really isn't a very good story teller.
I use him merely as an object lesson. Jurassic Park 2-3, Godzilla, and any number of other computer generated turkeys would do just as well.
CGI has been the death of special effects wizardry. If you can imagine it, you can put it on the screen by throwing enough computers at it. In earlier times you had to think about how to do the special effects. And audiences could still be surprised and amazed when a particularly clever effect or dramatic stunt worked.
I am reminded of an earlier technical revolution - the movie camera. Acting in front of an audience is a completely different skill than doing it in front of a camera. In live theater there is a conversation of sorts between the cast and the audience. The actors gain or lose energy from this interaction, and the performances are never exactly the same twice except for long-running statistical outliers like "The King and I". In movies everything is done and redone until it is exactly how the director wants it. The audience is, quite literally, out of the picture.
The ability to sustain acting skills and character is less important these days than "star quality". In fact, being too good an actor is a detriment because people will forget that they are seeing fill in name of starlet or c**t-throb of the moment and believe they are seeing the actual character.
Shadow of the Vampire had a couple really good lines along this line. The lead actress tells how she gains life and vitality from an audience but "this [the camera] sucks the life from me".
CGIfying everything simply continues the process of removing life and acting from, well, acting
Re: The Movie Stinks (Score:3, Interesting)
> Personally, I blame it all on CGI.
I agree. Too many movies are "about" the special effects these days, which means they are more suitable for use as screensavers than for showing in the cinema.
FWIW, I thought the CGI was the weakest part of Pirates, but since it wasn't the center of attention the film was very enjoyable anyway.
Hopefully within a few years the "newness" of CGI will wear off and producers/directors will go back to making movies rather than extended CGI demos. And maybe text messaging will help speed that day.
Re:addendum: (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, if you look at international gross, ID4 actually grossed more than all the Star Wars pictures except for Phantom Menace. How such a stupid movie gets the third highest gross of all time is beyond me. The only thing that bothers me more is that the #2 film is apparently Harry Potter. That's just annoying.
Holding other factors constant (Score:3, Interesting)
What really seems to be teeing them off though, is that their business model is no longer valid. Used to be, if they spent enough on advertising, people wouldn't figure out that a movie sucked until after they'd seen it. But the mob has gotten too smart for them. Economies operate efficiently when all participants have perfect information. Now that movie goers have better information, film distributors can no longer misappropriate utility from movie consumers by flooding the market with false info claiming that a sucky movie is good. Boo hoo.
Did all that utility that the marketers were misappropriating evaporate? No. The consumers still have it. They'll use it to rent a DVD of something that doesn't suck instead. So, like, don't sweat it.
**They'd do better to ensure that the suckiness of movies decreased, rather than holding it constant.
Re:So this means (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:You Say that as a Joke, But... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was having dinner outside at a restaurant across the alleyway from an Irish pub (in Sonoma, CA). There was a band at the pub. At one point in the evening they played "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". Only it wasn't the hymn. I was corrected by my friend, Susan, who's from Ireland, and who explained to me that the tune to the hymm was lifted from an Irish song.
I already knew that we stole the music to the Star Spangled Banner (an English pub song), America the Beautiful (God Save the Queen), and When Johnny Comes Marching Home (an anti-war English song). But the Battle Hymn of the Republic? That's beyond the pale.
My god, this nation was created on the basis of violations of copyright!
Re:Hrrmmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Just beacuse a movie has great sales doesn't mean it was worth it. Final Fantasy had $74m in sales, which is pretty good, except that it cost $137m to make. Ouch.
--Dan
Re:let's blame everything but the obvious.... (Score:2, Interesting)
When they make a good movie the "text messaging effect" (if it even exists) ought to work in their favor. They ought to quit whining about it.
Heck, if the ratio of good movies to turkeys was actually greater than 1:1 (and thus this whole thing actually helped their bottom line), the MPAA would be singing the praises of text messaging.
Pauline Kael and 'Star Wars' (Score:3, Interesting)
Oddly, this is pretty much the reason the (in)famous movie critic at the New Yorker, Pauline Kael, disparaged the original Star Wars: she thought it was far more driven by visuals than by story, and that it could set a bad precedent that could last generations, if studios took its success as a spur to focus ever more on topping one another in the effects department and let story go completely by the wayside.
I'll be honest--if I'd read Kael's review when I was growing up (I was 10 when Star Wars came out in 1977), I'd have been incensed. But when I saw the movie again for the 20th anniversary release, I was shocked at just how bad the script was. I know this is still blasphemy, but listen to the dialogue objectively sometime--concentrating on it just as a movie, not as an icon. I can all but guarantee it'll be depressing just how leaden the writing is. There's a famous quote from Harrison Ford on the set of that first movie, when he exclaimed, "You can write this shit, George, but you can't say it."
Re:Communication a problem? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure if that's correct. The problem is that companies get their money as soon as you've purchased a product, rather than after you're satisfied with it. That means that producers make money by producing products that will sell well (the profitable part of the transaction) rather than ones than satisfy customers. But that would be true regardless of whether advertizing existed or not. Absent advertizing companies would just focus on price, with consequent drop in quality, rather than specific features that make advertizing interesting. But the focus would still be on getting people to buy the product, rather than on making a product that makes the customer happy.
Re:This just in!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
critics and "Gigli" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Communication a problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm willing to bet that you don't find a single one. Not on US TV, at least. Because ads are actually regulated -- you CAN'T make a claim that's false; you have to have evidence to back up any claim stated as a fact.
Re:New movie rating... E for Eurotrash (Score:2, Interesting)
not enough evidence (Score:3, Interesting)
Warning: The following is an angry rant. Sometimes it's good to vent.
From the artcle:
WHAT THE FUCK!? Yeah, you're right that used to happen! Maybe before the flippin' telephone was invented! Why does the article want to say that it's IM that's the problem? C'mon, like those people with cell phones can't just call their friends and say, "the movie sucked"? The article points to the fact that recent blockbusters have been losing 11% more viewers between their opening weekend and their second weekend than equivilently bad blockbusters did last year. The article then draws the (gratuitously asinine) conclusion that it must be because now people can instant message their friends. Oooookaaaay. Maybe they could just call their friends? Like, you know, on a phone? Oh wait, that wouldn't let us explain the 11% increase, gee I guess it must be the text messages! Stupid article. Maybe this year's blockbuster bombs suck 11% more than last year's. Maybe the public is 11% less tolerant of the same old crap as they were last year. Maybe (just maybe) ELEVEN GOD-DAMN PERCENT IS NOT STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT ENOUGH TO SUPPORT THE BRAIN DAMAGED THEORY THAT INSTANT MESSAGING RESULTS IN FEWER TICKET SALES!!!!
I know I'm on my way to Karma hell for this post, but I don't really care. It was fun. And that sort of sloppy thinking really does piss me off. Of course, I may be guilty of it myself on occasion, but at least I try to avoid it...
It is simple economics (Score:2, Interesting)
The movies have been a huge growth industry. For the last 10 to 20 years they've been making more and more big budget films and they've been able to make money off of them. The growth is tapering off and now they are starting to lose money.
Loss of sales through: word of mouth; text messages; the web; DVD's; whatever; these are all symptoms of the problem. The real solution will be less investment in films. Or maybe just less accelerated investment in films.