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By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 - 2 Comments »
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Indiana Jones & The Battle For Dominance In Utterly Irrelevant Hype

One of the ways the very valuable, well-run, helpful internet ticket buying companies are now hyping themselves is to send out weekly reports on their tickets sales. These reports are now regularly reported on websites, including Variety’s, and even referred to in Traditional Media.
One problem… they’re irrelevant non-information posing as valuable info.
You see, the further any poll gets from an unbiased survey, the less valuable that poll becomes. The least reported on aspect of polling, even in the political season, is how questions skew any survey. For instance, last night, 21% of people in KY said race was important in their voting choice… and only 80% of those people voted for Clinton… this, according to the exit polling. Something is screwy there, unless you have a lot of white people voting for Obama because he’s black or the polling is simply wrong. We have no way of knowing.
Polls by ticket-sellers are also skewed… mostly by the vagaries of online ticket sales, none of which are offered as warnings when these numbers are bandied about. I would be willing to bet that more women use the service than men, that parents who are taking smaller kids to the movies use it more than single for matinees, and that bigger cities with theaters that sell out regularly have a much higher percentage of online sales than anywhere else.
So in other words, Sex & The City should be doing big numbers with women who are planning to go one opening weekend in cities where the show had the biggest penetration, which is bigger cities. So on the Fandango chart below, you see a 5-to-1 percentage of ticket sales for S&TC vs Narnia, when there is almost no chance that this weekend

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2 Responses to “Indiana Jones & The Battle For Dominance In Utterly Irrelevant Hype”

  1. repeatfather says:
    May 22, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    Wow, that is truly unbelievable that they’d be reporting those numbers as if it was some kind of telltale sign of a movie’s success.
    That’s about as unscientific as it gets.

  2. Chucky in Jersey says:
    May 22, 2008 at 5:43 pm

    It’s also a way for the Liberal Media to avoid bad news (Picturehouse, WiP both shut down) or a genuine trend (Regal Cinemas adding 3D chainwide).

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon