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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Sunday, December 28th, 2008 - 4 Comments »
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The Per-Screen Scam

I am kinda sick of seeing screaming headlines/alerts about movies that are opening to “HUGE” per-screen averages at the end of the year… all the more absurd as studio-level wide release marketing budgets are leading to these HUGE exclusive openings.
I get it… I get it. But it is a scam and journalists should be saying so.
This weekend it is a $64,000 per-screen average – estimated, of course – for Revolutionary Road. That’s – get this – fewer than 350 tickets per screen than Frost/Nixon‘s HUGE opening. And what is all the box office maven buzz this week (coming, not surprisingly, from Rev Road HQ )? That Frost/Nixon is underperforming. (Not really fair… but another conversation.)
And then there are the pesky details… like I did the math and realized that Rev Road on 3 screens was mathematically incapable of grossing $64,000 per. Then I looked… it’s in three theaters… on 5 screens…. which really makes it $36,400 per… estimated.
Oh.
The Top 10 per-screen launches this year until this weekend… and no, I have not yet checked for actual screen count for the others… I will as soon as I can.
Frost/Nixon – $180,708 – 3 – $60,236 – $2,659,000 – 12/5/08
The Wrestler – $202,714 – 4 – $50,679 – $648,000 – 12/17/08
Gran Torino – $271,720 – 6 – $45,287 – $2,619,000 – 12/12/08
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl – $220,297 – 5 – $44,059 – $17,657,973 – 6/20/08
Milk – $1,453,844 – 36 – $40,385 – $12,281,000 – 11/26/08
Slumdog Millionaire – $360,018 – 10 – $36,002 – $16,693,000 – 11/12/08
Doubt – $507,226 – 15 – $33,815 – $5,000,000 – 12/12/08
Changeling – $489,015 – 15 – $32,601 – $35,417,977 – 10/24/08
Rachel Getting Married – $293,369 – 9 – $32,597 – $9,785,033 – 10/3/08
Che – $61,070 – 2 – $30,535 – $108,961 – 12/12/08

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4 Comments »

4 Responses to “The Per-Screen Scam”

  1. T. Holly says:
    December 28, 2008 at 11:49 am

    I can’t remember, didn’t Ed Douglas take up this cause last year?

  2. martin says:
    December 28, 2008 at 1:00 pm

    This is the boy who cried wolf. If the per-screens worked out to BIG wide release numbers almost every time, then it would make sense to proclaim success with big limited release numbers. But rarely does a limited-release “hit” turn out to be a REAL hit. Even with this PR scam of it being a hit before it’s actually a hit. A quality entertainment journalist should always have an * – “take these numbers with a grain of salt since this is a big budget Hollywood film on a very small number of screens. It may mean the film is popular, or it may mean nothing at all.”

  3. Hardy says:
    December 28, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    I usually hear per theater average instead of per screen average.

  4. Chucky in Jersey says:
    December 28, 2008 at 5:04 pm

    Hardy, you are correct.

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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