MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, June 6th, 2012 - 1 Comment »
Be Sociable, Share!

The Silly Report Season: SNL Kagan & The Bizarre Notion Of Domestic Only

Another idiotic non-story.

Quick. Ask anyone who is paying attention whether anyone produced movies in 2011 expecting to get a even 50% or better return on those movies (with one or two exceptions… primarily comedy) from the domestic theatrical market alone.

To be (overly) fair, SNL Kagan (according to David Liebermann, who gets all these reports to promote because he doesn’t seem to understand them or care) included domestic Home Entertainment. Of course, by annualizing this, the study – guessstimates – confuse the basics. So this report about 2011 is focusing on Paramount’s 2010 release, True Grit. So does Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Paramount’s #2 owned release in 2011 exist in 2011 or do we wait to count than in 2012’s numbers? And by using the broadest numbers for Home Entertainment, how do they take distribution choices made by each studio?

As noted, I don’t trust Lieberman’s analysis of the analysis much, but it would seem, for instance, that they counted all of Paramount’s domestic theatrical as Paramount’s, but is also counting DreamWorks Animation separately. Huh?

But the most stupid notion is that SNL Kagan – or any independent analyst – can work through all these tortured numbers for a year and then come up with a percentage that anyone paying attention would consider legit… and then argue that there is an industry trend based on a 2% change in that tortured number the next year.

And what are they really saying? That the expanding international theatrical market is generating a higher percentage of revenue vs domestic? Is there someone who is deaf, blind, dumb and without taste buds who hasn’t known that for the last 5 years without a report? Is there anything here more valuable than the self-promotion for Kagan?

I’m sure there are very smart people over there spending months trying to get The Weinstein Company to tell them how much they spend marketing The King’s Speech in 2011. But these kinds of numbers are so overly broad as to be nothing but junk information… aka Silly.

Be Sociable, Share!

1 Comment »

One Response to “The Silly Report Season: SNL Kagan & The Bizarre Notion Of Domestic Only”

  1. Tyler says:
    June 6, 2012 at 10:06 am

    I realize you just reflexively shit on anything anyone ever reports about anything remotely related to the movie business out of habit (how else will you have something to say about a business you’ve never been in), but you’re grasping at straws even more so than usual here.

    Year over year comparisons are made to standardize the sample from each studio, irrespective of their particular release calendar. While not perfect for every string of analysis one could make, it is a fair compromise to compare data.

    And hard data to support the conclusion everyone has made that international matters isn’t a bad thing. I don’t understand your animus towards someone digging through data and showing it. These reports are primarily for the business world, not bloggers who like to interview directors. You’re not the audience, but someone is. Although even those interested in the creative end of the movie business should find it at least a tad bit interesting, since the recent necessary focus on international informs the types and sizes of movies that are actually made.

    Your nihilism (it’s no longer just contrarianism) leaves no room for anyone to ever say anything about anything. I suppose this is your aim, since that is the only world in which anyone would actually ever listen to you.

The Hot Blog

Comments Most Recent Archives

Quote Unquotesee all »

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