Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Hollywood Will Eat Itself

While at a recently-opened multiplex cinema run by a well-known national chain some time ago, I was sitting in my seat waiting for the film to start. The scheduled start time passed without even a hint of the auditorium darkening and the irritating adverts beginning. A few more minutes passed, so i ambled to the door and asked if the film was going to start at some point. Yes, said the person on the door. The film will start at 5:30. Uh, but this is the 5:10 screening, I said. Yes, but the film itself will start at around 5:30. Yes, but there's NOTHING THERE AT ALL! Not even adverts! Someone needs to start the screening off, even if it's just to get the irritating adverts and annoying trailers out of the way!

After a bit of to-and-froing along these lines, another chap wandered up to see what all the fuss was about. This time he grasped the issue at hand and sent someone off to give the projection booth a kick, and while this was happening we had a little chat about the amount of adverts and trailers which are screened before the main film starts these days - usually at least 20 minutes at the start of the screening is taken up in this way.

The reason for this, I was informed, is that when a punter buys a ticket the full sale price of that ticket basically goes straight to the distributor to pay for the right to screen the movie. The full ticket price - so for every adult sitting in that cinema the distributor is getting, say, around six quid. Most of this goes straight on to the studio.

Where the cinema makes its money (and those giant multiplexes don't pay for themselves) is in retail, which explains why popcorn costs three quid and you need to take out a mortgage to buy a hot dog. Where they also make money is.. you guessed it.. trailer and advert reels. These are supplied as complete programmes which can simply be spliced onto the beginning of the main feature, ready-to-go packages of advertisements and excessively-long trailers for forthcoming films, and showing them is an important part of the cinema's revenue model. I have noticed that for some exceptionally popular films there sometimes isn't an advert reel, which is presumably explained by the greater retail income the cinema can generate through managing to squeeze in another couple of full-house screenings per day. (Incidentally, the centrally-produced nature of modern advert reels probably helps to explain why the number of cheesy "After the show, why not come to the Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant?" local adverts seems to have dropped enormously in favour of major brands.)

All of this contributes - as anyone who's been to a big cinema recently will know - to the essentially miserable experience of modern moviegoing. It's easy to lose yourself in the magic of cinema once the main feature starts (provided it doesn't suck, that is), but the entire process of going to the cinema seems to be deliberately designed to put the viewer in as bad a mood as possible by the time the film starts.

Firstly, there's the feeling of being reamed twice - once for the outlandish ticket prices and again if you want to even think about getting something to eat or drink. Then there's the stagger through always-identical, garishly-decorated corridors to find Screen 25 or whichever one it is. The seats are better than they used to be, that's for sure, but when you're in your seat and the lights dim it's not time for entertainment yet, ah no. It's time to pay your dues and help the cinema's income by sitting through a pile of adverts and trailers for films you don't want to see. Once the film actually starts you're usually sick and tired of the whole thing.

This "we get the whole of the pie" approach to divvying up ticket revenue helps to explain why every major blockbuster movie that comes out seems to break all-time box office records. The flipside of that, however, is that blockbuster movies are so expensive to make today that the kind of revenues the multiplex system can generate are necessary to keep making them. Firstly, you need a big star, who will need to be paid something that makes Premiership footballers look like they're on the breadline. With the recent news that Tom Cruise looks set to pocket up to $200 million (a 10% share of the profits plus a share of merchandising profits) for a forthcoming trilogy of The War Of The World, this obscene overpayment doesn't look likely to disappear in a hurry.

Secondly, you need goshwow special effects, and heaven help you if they're not state of the art. I, Robot, which caused little more than a blip in the British summer season, cost an estimated $105 million. This is an awful lot of money in anyone's books, although even Will Smith is a lot cheaper than Tom Cruise. What this leads to is a kind of film budget arms race, as costs escalate and ticket prices have to escalate to keep paying for the costs. And then there's the profits which have to be made..

It's also happening far too often that relatively small producers with relatively small budgets are coming out of nowhere and eating the big guys' lunch. They are doing this, quite simply, by actually paying attention to trivia such as plot, dialogue and the quality of the film itself rather than the goshwow factor. Without allowing for inflation, Four Weddings And A Funeral cost $6 million to make and grossed $244 million worldwide, a profit of - well, you work it out. Hollywood doesn't see things this way, though - the next blockbuster has to be bigger and better and blockbustier than the one before, so costs are going to keep rising and the experience of going to the cinema is going to keep getting more and more miserable as the money has to be screwed out of people to keep paying for these vast-budget behemoths.

In the end, it seems more or less inevitable that the whole system will collapse as the market economy takes effect - when tickets are too expensive people won't go to the cinema, when refreshments are too expensive people won't buy them (I'm at that stage already), and when that happens where will the money come from to pay for the films? What's the point in making gazillion-dollar blockbusters if nobody's willing to pay to see them any more?

The future, I conclude, has to be with the independents and with the low-budget filmmakers. The Cohn Brothers made Fargo for an estimated $7 million. The Shawshank Redemption, one of the greatest movies of our time, cost a relatively generous $25 million (and only just broke even in box office receipts). Spider-Man 2 cost $200 million. I think I know which of these three is the better movie, but if you're thinking "Ha, he's just being a movie snob and deriding Spider-Man 2 for being popular!", I hasten to add that the example of Four Weddings shows that a billion-dollar budget isn't necessary for an extremely popular box-office smash.

I rest my case. Something big has got to change in the culture of the cinema, or the cinema-going experience for the average viewer is just going to keep getting worse. I don't think the solution's in boycotting anyone or downloading movies off the Internet (let's face it, that's a crappy alternative to seeing them on the big screen). The solution is for people to try and send a message by choosing to see films based on quality rather than budget, in the hope of being able to reclaim the cinema as something for everyone, not just for those who can afford the ticket prices at their local multiplex.

Posted by mpk at September 6, 2004 2:16 PM | TrackBack