A Modest Proposition On Movie Windows

Truly, this 3-week, $60 a screening window Universal wants to test on Tower Heist is a joke. If they get 100 people to buy it, it will be a bloody miracle. Seriously. 3 figures would be a surprise.

But if they want to test this stupid idea, how about agreeing to test other ideas already?

On Jack & Jill, opening the next weekend in November, try a 3-month VOD window, putting it out at $5 a view and not on DVD for another 3 months and when it does hit DVD, reduce the VOD price to $2 a view. See what happens.

Then, for New Year’s Eve, let’s remove it from theaters on Dec 30, and push it only to VOD on New Year’s Eve… at $20 a view.

And on The Sitter, how about a four month window after theatrical, then release to all post-theatrical platforms on the same day, including pay-TV and Netflix streaming.

Then you’ll have four different kinds of tests and some information to work with. Make the detailed information about sales available to NATO…. and the press (please!).

Put your money where your tests are! You want to mess with the window? Fine. Don’t put all the risk and blame on exhibition. Both sides risk in these tests. Be honest about the results.

And then, the future can be discussed as an industry.

And if you had real faith in these reindeer games, let’s see Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol go day-n-date to boot. Public agreement that there will be no “you let us do it once, so we have the right to keep doing it” crap. Test it. Let’s see how it works. $25 at home. Regular prices at the theater. Popular movie. How many people would watch it on opening weekend at home.

I support and believe in exhibition, but let’s push this thing! If day-n-date makes sense, let’s find out and figure out where the chips will fall over time. I believe that windows will prove to be the best way to maximize revenues (and enjoy movies, btw). But if it isn’t, studios should want to push.

All this tippy toeing does nothing but create trouble, distrust, and animosity.

Iron Chef: Movie Distribution
Secret Ingredient: Public Preferences

Allez! Cuisine!

Anatomy Of A Trending Web Story

This is how things work. I can’t bitch about it too much. But apparently, some people want to sue others over less.

On Friday at 3:26p pst, I got an e-mail from a reader I’ve never heard from before that said only, “Possible Detroit area ruling over misleading DRIVE trailer” and had this screen cap off a TV:

I wrote the guy back immediately, seeking more info… but wouldn’t get a response until 11 hours later. By then, I’d pushed the story out into the industry bloodstream and had had it repeated without credit to me for finding it multiple times.

Of course, I didn’t “find” the story. I got a tip. And I didn’t “report” the story. Detroit’s WDIV did.. on air. But there was, when I checked, not a single reference to the story anywhere on the web, Not a mention of a suit. Not a claim of antisemitism against Drive. And not a word about it on the WDIV website.

So I called a representative of the film. She hadn’t heard anything. I forwarded on the e-mail, sans the tipster’s info.

I called the station, trying to get a hold of someone who knew about the story. After talking to 3 people, I got the reporter – though I didn’t know who the “business editor” for the station was in relation to the story – and got a voice mail around 7p on a Friday night.

I continued to wait on a sign of the story on the station’s video-heavy website and also continued to research on-line from every possible set of keywords.

I posted to Twitter at around 4:25p – “Slowly Breaking Dumb News du Jour: Some whack in Detroit’s trying to sue “Drive” 4 being anti-Semitic. Brooks wraps up Academy skinhead vote.” I still only had the screen image that was sent… not the whole story… nothing on the web.

Around 4:50p, WDIV finally posted the video of the story to their website. I tweeted a link to the video and “Here’s the nutjob suing Film District & Imagine Theaters For “Misleading” Drive Trailer” at about 4:55p.

At 5p, I posted the link to the video and a screencap of the WDIV story to my blog.

As it turns out, others were already tweeting the story and then the link to WDIV without any mention of me or MCN or Hot Blog at all.

I get a tweet from a friendly blogger from a big traffic site making sure I am ok with him using my screen cap. Sure I am. Who cares? But then, when he writes, he gives first credit on the story to some web-journalist who clearly read my tweets and ran a link to WDIV without mentioning where he unearthed it. So now credit is being handed out… but as the guy who did the leg work, I am getting second position to one of my readers.

This is how the web is shitty. There is no authority trying to keep everyone fair and generous. But we all have to deal with it. The guy who asked has surely had stories he felt some ownership of “stolen.” Probably even the guy who couldn’t be bothered to credit his source.

And ironically, the fight between The Hollywood Reporter and Nikki Finke and Sharon Waxman is about news that isn’t really news at all. It’s primarily information that is placed and one of the three of them may get a short window of exclusivity so they can say EXCLUSIVE and TOLDJA whenever they have a chance. There is occasional broken news… but in this business, it’s 2 or 3 stories a week and they are usually in the real papers (WSJ, FT, NYT) and those stories are also almost always about choosing placement.

MCN is the oldest and still, for my money, best aggregation of movie news in the world. David Hudson is brilliant, but not the same thing. Ray Pride, who is the editor of the headline section and who finds most of the content for those links, does a remarkable job. And on a daily basis, I would say we push out the work of other writers/outlets 2 or 3 times that would never be found by the blog/web mainstream without his effort. We see these obscure stories pop up all over the place, almost never credited or hat-tipped, every single day.

One idiot likes to say that I think we own the news. I do not. But every once in a while, when we find it first – at least in our circle – it can sting to see a story take off as others pretend they unearthed it. Good and aggressive aggregating is an editorial skill. Like reporting, it is not free or mindless.

It has been the the rule at MCN, from day one, to try to get as close to the original reporting as possible and to seek out the best reporting we can on any story to which we link. We don’t always go far enough to find the origins. So we can’t claim not to have credited unfairly with our links either. But we do try. We are thinking about the issue daily.

That said, WDIV did the reporting. Someone tipped me to that report. This is, basically, a nuisance story, appropriate for a Friday afternoon chuckle.

Stakes are low. I made a couple of calls. I dug out the video. No big deal. Daily work stuff.

But almost because it’s so minor – and continuing spread around the web today with links only to WDIV that would not be out there were it not for me… and may well have been found by TMZ sometime this week – it seems like a good exemplar of how quickly and without much thought or malice, individual efforts are flattened on the ever-churning web.

The Flailure of Netflix

“If I could turn back time…”

No one wants to see Reed Hastings in a Cher costume. But he has gone from The Best Owner In Sports to the guy trying to explain why there might be a strike because the billionaires and the millionaires can’t agree how to split this year’s giant pile of money.

Truth is, he’s not the villain in all of this. He’s a victim, in my eyes, of believing – for a split second – that he had more control of the market than he ever did.

It still comes down to the first Big Lie… that consumers could have it all for virtually nothing.

The lie started as a truth. Turning the DVD rental model, which was wildly overpriced in a market of ever-lowering sell-thru pricing, into a subscription model was brilliant. I don’t think anyone disagrees on that.

But the move to streaming, an interesting added benefit at first, became a monster. It assumed a false premise, on the Netflix side, that was true on the DVD-by-mail side… that Netflix had control of barriers to competition. That being first and bringing along a base of 15 million subscribers would insure domination.

But when a gimmick became The Future, the game was flipped.

There was no way that on purchase… of $8, $9, or $20 could ever pay enough content providers enough money for them to be satisfied in a streaming-replacing-DVD universe. Even on the grandest level, one company could gather 100 million subscribers and gross $24 billion a year. The industry wants that to be $50 billion. And why would the content owners give anyone else that kind of control over that kind of money?

Netflix was in more trouble than it could handle – as defined by the company’s image – the minute it did its first big content deal with Relativity. That set the pricing bar. And the math has been problematic ever since.

Every domestic move – perceived as bad moves – they have made since has been driven by the math. But as I keep saying, every responsive move has been trying to put a Band-Aid on the small problem. They can’t address the real problem. It’s not the price point. As many have noted, Netflix is actually cheaper for the many people who now primarily stream and for those who don’t stream at all. The problem is the perception of Netflix’s content.

Quickster is just another example of the perception problem. Yes, many people were upset and potentially inconvenienced by a split of the business into two completely separate divisions. But the heart of the problem was that the illusion that you could get any movie available in Home Entertainment from Netflix, one way or another. (This was never true.. but that’s really irrelevant. People felt it was true.)

So now they have “fixed” that problem. But the big problem remains… no matter how much Netflix remains a bargain at its pricing for people who use it regularly, it is still a business whose premise was offering you everything now giving you less and less content every month. It”s not going to get better, no matter how they cherry pick content (like The Walking Dead). Netflix is moving towards being all the things that media has been saying about Hulu… aside from owned by 3 studios.

There’s no way to project the future of Netflix. It will very much be based on strategic choices. If Lionsgate and Summit could ever get together, using some of Summit’s cash to buy Netflix would make perfect sense. They could be the first distributor to go fully streaming, maximize the massive Lionsgate library, and quickly become a central streaming space for the entire indie universe.

OR Netflix could hold out, chasing subscribers worldwide, and slowly become its own marginalized player.

OR Netflix could give partial ownership to a couple of majors – say, Paramount and Sony – and trendset as a completionist streaming site for those two majors and whatever other content could be leased.

There are variation on those three notions and many others. But the idea of Netflix as a cultural guerrilla hero bringing truth, justice, and endless cheap content to the masses… that’s over.

It will be fascinating to see how long it takes Hastings & Co to move off of the Big Lie and Band-Aids to the truth. The problem is, the more they spin, the more trust is eroded, the harder it will be for their customer base to accept the Band-Aid being pulled off. The truth isn’t that bad. It is the reality of the future. Netflix is now and forever becoming a programming service, not unlike HBO or Showtime or Starz. It is, as a streaming business, more expansive in its content than those pay-tv businesses. But the others will expand as Netflix continues to contract (all the while betting on a single new series while HBO launches a half dozen new ones a year while milking the veteran shows). And at some point, the advantage of having a hard-wired cable berth and not just a wi-fi dependent stream will clearly/publicly shift to the pay-tvers… just as everything around theatrical distribution (including the revenue) continues to be the prime differentiator of studio movies from all but a handful of indies, direct-to-dvd or direct-to-streaming content.

And so it goes…

Your Likely Best Actress Oscar Winner

There are some great performances to come, no doubt.

But in spite of a fairly mediocre movie around her, Michelle Williams gives a performance that is, simply, beyond.

Like Charlize Theron’s turn in Monster, this is not something you will see again from Williams. But also like Theron, Williams embodies her character completely, never showing herself to be an imitator, even as we can hear and see so many similarities. She becomes a woman who might well have been Marilyn Monroe. She floats and seduces and loses all the life in her eyes and body and in way that is oh so rare, becomes an enigma that you can’t stop watching.

The movie, My Week With Marilyn, is based on a memoir and it is the story they chose. I can hardly demand that they changed it to better effect. It’s a rather ripe moment in Monroe’s life, so that’s great. (Another real standout in the film is an unrecognizable Dougray Scott – aka The Man Who Would Be Wolverine – as Arthur Miller.)

Williams great performances have, mostly, been about her skill is exposing herself emotionally… amongst the most raw, painful, real women you will see on film. But here, she finds that intense, sad, intimate truth, but also puts on a show as a showstopping sex bomb… and really brings to life how Marilyn’s power was about the energy she offered and not just boobs and butt and lips.

When she asks, “Should I be ‘her’?” at one point in the film and transforms herself instantly into the embodiment of her image, it’s not a movie moment… pretty woman turning the tables… it’s a glimpse into a person who knows so much, but who cannot bring that rational insight into the rest of her life. It’s not the great O’Toole moment in My Favorite Year, when he can finally take a bow, overcoming his fear and reveling in his status, but sometime deeper… more poignant because there isn’t the relief… it’s no nightmare on the surface, but it’s a deadly trap.

The performance could be compared to Marion Cotillard’s Oscar-winning transformation in La Vie en Rose or Theron’s turn… but I have to say… this performance owns its own space because the emotional shifts are tougher. The director has clearly studied all of Monroe’s photos and there are a ton of very specific references, which sometimes makes it feel stunty. But then, once Williams has some space to breathe as a character… well, I know this actress’ work and I have spent some time chatting with her and I didn’t see anything of the Michelle Williams I am familiar with in this entire film, with the exception of 2 consecutive shots in one scene. I can’t say that of her other terrific performances, however varied.

I give a lot of credit to cinematographer Ben Smithard and director Simon Curtis (both TV guys stepping up in class) for how they shot her face… but the light behind those eyes all comes from the actor.

She’ll likely be up against Oscar winners Streep and Theron, and perhaps former nominees Davis & Close. All great performances (I am assuming on Close, whose film I haven’t seen, but for which she has been endlessly praised)… but I can’t imagine that any of them is the kind of magic trick pulled off by Williams… who also is in the classic winning position of having been previously nominated more than once, including last year. (See: Colin Firth)

I wish the movie was as good as the performance, but then again, the eco-sytem that led to the performance deserves a lot of credit as well.

Relativity’s Untitled Snow White: This Week’s Image Gallery

Weekend Estimates by Klady

2:56p – So it looks like DreamWorks found a family audience over the weekend for Real Steel. And still, right between The Departed and Zombieland for October openings.

After I mentioned speculation by others about the budget yesterday – taking no position on it myself – I heard from the studio, quoting the $110m figure with passion. As noted before, I have no interest in attracting any more drama from the film’s paranoid producer, so I am perfectly happy to please absolute personal ignorance on the matter and to report to you what others are saying.

$100m domestic is unlikely but not impossible for this film. But as I wrote yesterday, October was risky and this film will do very well domestically given its berth. Look to foreign. I wouldn’t be shocked to see this film do $200m international.

Likewise, as noted yesterday, The Ides of March is right in the pocket for that kind of movie at this time of year. No thriller. No failure.

Dolphin Tale is going to outgross Moneyball domestically. Go figure.

The most shocking thing outside of the Top 5, to me, is The Help still doing $2 million a weekend in this, it’s ninth weekend. To give you an idea of how impressive this is, of the Top 15 from this summer, only 3 films grossed as much as $1 million on Weekend Nine. One was Potter, which was just barely there, $1583 over $1m that weekend. (The vast majority was under $500k.) Only Bridemaids topped The Help in Weekend Nine, $2.6m vs $2m even. And which one of these films will go down in history as the #9 film of the summer of 2011 will be touch and go until The Help finally leaves theaters. (Don’t be shocked to see an Oscar-nod re-release if Help stays behind Brides and scores a Best Picture nomination in January.)

The other thing is the ongoing run of Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain, now at $6.9 million, the #4 domestic doc grossser of 2011, after the Justin Bieber concert movie, Disney’s African Cats, and the IMAXer Born to Be Wild. It’s even outgrossed the beloved and successful Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Buck.

Earlier – I’m at the Harvest Festival, about 3 miles from the Reagan Library. Analysis when I finish loading pumpkins…

Street Art On Steve Jobs (Photo by Romanek)

Mark Romanek’s photo page

Friday Estimates by Reel Klady

If you look at the modern history of October movies, you’ll see that DreamWorks tried to break new ground with Real Steel. It will certainly play to some family business, but it looks like a tweener… a big action movie based around punching that has a warm father-child story in the middle. At least, that’s what they’re selling. I turned down my multiple invitations to see the film because of “the Don Murphy situation.” so I haven’t seen the actual film. It’s gotten some nice notices, especially from EW’s Anthony Breznican, who really embraced the family angle. In any case, DreamWorks/Disney were trying to thread the needle.

October tends to be loaded with R-rated films and PG-13 that are close to Rs; horror, adult dramas, the occasional adult comedy, and kids films. Your top 5 October openers are Jackass 3D, Scary Movie 3, Shark Tale, High School Musical 3, and Paranormal Activity 2. All 31 films to open over $20m in October were in the last decade and the breakout is: 10 horror films, 5 adult dramas, 4 adult comedies, 4 kids films, and 8 “other” (Jackass 1 & 3, This Is It, Kill Bill V1, Ladder 49, Red, Law Abiding Citizen, Friday Night Lights).

What you don’t see are any 4-quadrant family-safe sometimes-adventure-y populist fare, aka Sean Levy films. You get down under the $20m openings and find the occasional School of Rock or The Legend of Zorro or Demolition Man, but you’re really going down the list on $s to find those.

Point is… gutsy date. Weird date for this movie. And will it pay off? I’ll stay away from budget on this one…

(EDIT: 4:17p – It’s very, very important to Don Murphy that you know that it’s not him defending Real Steel’s budget in the Comments section on Deadline. I wrote, “Don already seems to be fighting that fight at Deadline…” And now, having removed this very important 10 words… and offering my deepest apologies for assuming that Don was behaving like Don… back to the analysis)

… where someone is claiming to have been told $147m after rebates and someone else is saying $80m. Truth is, the potential profit of this film is in international, where it could very well be another Disney film that does multiples of the domestic gross overseas.

That said, the weekend estimate fed to Finke by Disney of $26m doesn’t seem likely. There are not a lot of films with history to sample that fit in any way with this film or this opening number. But Zombieland opened to $9.5m, did a $24.7m 3-day. The Departed, $8.7m/$26.9m, Where The Wild Things Are, $12m/$32.7m, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, $8m/$29.3m. Will it play like a kids film? Will it be a date movie? Will teens buzz positively? No one really knows. If I had to bet, I’d bet $24m and change… not in tomorrow’s estimates, but in the finals. But who knows?

The Ides of March is a more traditional choice in this release slot and will get fairly expected numbers. 2006: Flags of Our Fathers, 2007: Michael Clayton, 2008: W., 2009: n/a, 2010: Hereafter. They all opened between $10m and $12m. Ides will probably be on the low end, but it will be right in there. Anyone who is surprised or throwing crap at Clooney or Ryan Gosling for this opening is an idiot. And keep in mind, Sony created its own competition by releasing Moneyball three weekend ago. The Pitt film has a slightly more expansive base, but it includes the Ides audience. Asking over-40s to go out to the movies twice in 3 weekends is a tough get once you get out of the big cities.

Another strong hold for Dolphin Tale. Maybe Alcon is the Anchutz that Anchutz wanted to be.

Moneyball is paying some price for Ides’ entry into the market, off an estimated 43% yesterday. So is 50/50, though it’s decent hold these days.

At the arthouses, The Doo-Doo Movie With The Ugly Guy did pretty well last night. Perhaps some enterprising state with budget troubles will invest in portable bleachers so they can charge people to watch dead bodies pulled out of car wrecks… or if they’re lucky, the mobs can watch people trapped in the car when it explodes and audiences can watch them die, screaming as they burn to death. (There will be an extra charge if that happens… a 3D bump… death, dismemberment, dehumanization.) And somewhere, a critic will rationalize it.

Suprising Blu-ray Instruction Of The Week™

At the beginning of The Tree of Life

Stupid Lawsuit Of The Week!™

No embed feature available from WDIV TV, but here’s the link to their on-air story…

Some wacky woman (Sarah Deming) in the Detroit area is suing Film District and the local theater chain, claiming that the trailer for Drive made it look like a part of the Fast & Furious series and instead was dark and nasty and even anti-Semitic. OY!

“Drive bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film… having very little driving in the motion picture.”

Love it! So incredibly stupid.

ADD, Saturday 3p – The Actual Trailer In Question

Also…
DRIVE Lawsuit 2: A Critic & A Lawyer Walk Into A Bar…
DRIVE Lawsuit 3: Witness For The Screenwriter

Wow™- Sean Young Pleads For Work On Letterman

I don’t know that this is the scariest thing I have seen in a while… but it’s pretty close. A remarkable show of raw honesty, desperation, and absolute tone deafness. Sad, in the end.

Good Trailer™: Young Adult

Solid trailer, though missing the tougher elements that will get Theron nominated for Best Actress… and you really wouldn’t see the potential nomination of Patton Oswalt here… but it’s in there. Cody Diablo’s best screenplay. Reitman rocks it.

Richard Feynman On Criticism

This clip is about beauty, really. But the ideas that Feynman chews on, from the perspective of being a scientist, speaks very much to how I see the work of film criticism. His answer to an artist friend is very much my answer to those who wonder whether I can fully enjoy a film while being conscious of the elements of the film. It also speaks to the idea of considering box office or awards scenarios and other things that are not strictly about the art of the film.

(It’s also a beautiful video)

BYOB 100611

1 Week To 20 Weeks To Oscar: Counting Best Picture Ballots

So I’m a week from writing the weekly column… but the one issue that seems to keep cropping up is how the change in the Best Picture vote accounting rules really works. Steve Pond did a nice job trying to lay it all out when it happened. But people still seem to be unsure what is really up. So I had a chat with AMPAS’ Ric Robertson and Leslie Unger in the name of clarity. This is where I landed…

Here’s the column…