Editor’s Note: You can expect
regular dispatches from our own, resident theater owner right
here at 
Everyone seems to know how to run the movie business. Just
ask anybody about movies today and they'll tell you what's
going to flop, what movies should be like and how much ticket
prices should be. Of course, I guess most people think they
know how most everything in general should be run. It’s
the same mentality as the armchair QB; when you find someone
actually in the entertainment business, whether it is a video
store manager, executive producer, or movie theater owner,
they may have a slightly different approach, but they still
have all the answers. I fall into the latter of those job
descriptions, and guess what:
I don't know all the answers.
What I do know is what works for me. What, as the owner of
a small town, 1 screen, 1950's-era movie theater, will keep
the lights on and those well-funded backsides in the seats.
I'm also a big fan of movies, and frequent other theaters
at least 3 times a month, so I have a general idea what a
movie fan wants out of their theater-going experience.
Very few people understand what goes on behind the scenes
for the exhibitors who provide the venue in which you watch
these soon-to-be-classics or soon-to-be-videos. If I can give
you the least bit of insight into any of this, then maybe
you'll enjoy what I write. If not, at least maybe in the future,
you'll understand why it costs $7.50 to see a film and what
all those pre-show commercials are for.
 The
'Pigeons' have flown the Coup.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. The Walt Disney Company, AKA
The Mouse House, once the movie industry’s most bankable
name, has lost most, if not all, of its luster. One could
blame a stretch of creative inability, and they’d be
partly right. However, a considerable amount of the blame
should be placed on bad business decisions. Whether it was
the dismissal of the golden Miramax team and subsequent restructuring
or the public pissing contest over who should get more money
for Pixar’s brilliance; Disney is left standing now
on the thin pig that is its animation department and the struggling-to-keep-up
Buena Vista division.
Yet the business decisions in the boardroom about stock options
and jockeying for power aren’t what is killing the company.
It’s something bigger, something that Disney isn’t
the only company guilty of. It’s something that, to
you and I, would seem pretty simple; but to the Hollywood
bigwigs, it’s apparently Greek. It’s scheduling.
This brings me to today’s latest news. The British
WWII animated comedy, Valiant, originally scheduled for wide
release, is apparently having a cutback in print numbers.
Or so I’ve been told. As of yet, I haven’t been
able to find any information backing up this statement made
by a movie-booking agent, but I trust him enough not to lie
to me. So here begs the question: Why?
The film, which isn’t exactly a feather in the cap
of Disney since they outsourced the entire project, has been
marketed as heavily as any other Disney film released this
year. Dubbed to be another film from ‘the people that
brought you Shrek’, this film was released in the UK
to a decent overall gross. For all intents and purposes, the
Disney corporation should love to release a film as big as
they can that they put very little into and simply reap the
profits.
For theaters, this spells bad news. There is a serious lack
of fresh, kid fare coming into the final stretches of summer.
This is something new, especially from the Mouse House. In
general, mid-to-late August was their wheelhouse. Every year
you could pencil in a girl power, teen/kids film to have a
solid showing and bring in that always-desirable group of
teens and kids who drag their parents with them.
 It’s
not as if Disney didn’t have one in the can. Herbie:
Fully Loaded seemed like the perfect film to follow
in the long lineage of Princess Diaries, Freaky Friday, and Princess Diaries
2. If you looked at it 7 months ago, with the Herbie date TBA, I’d have put the mortgage on penciling this
film in. Yet, they apparently had bigger plans instead.
Clogging it into the same season that featured Star
Wars, Madagascar and the beginnings
of the summer blockbusters, Herbie did well,
but certainly wasn’t grabbing headlines as a few #1
weekends would have done in late August.
But don’t be down on Disney, they aren’t the
only ones. Hollywood treated the movie season as if it was
a plant and they were a weed. Piling films on top of each
other, choking the moviegoers with a blockbuster every week,
very few of them could live up to it. Star Wars, Madagascar, Batman Begins, The Longest Yard, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, War of the Worlds, The Island, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Bewitched,
and Fantastic 4 all released within the span
of 11 weeks. That’s 10 films that should be considered
safe bets to be over $150 million released in such a short
span. How could anyone expect that to succeed?
So now, with the sheer void of anything marketable available
in the next few weeks, what is a movie theater to do? Classic
film festivals? Second-run films? Close the doors? None of
those are really desirable. A classic film is always hit or
miss with the soaring popularity of DVDs, not to mention how
hard it is to market a film that isn’t currently getting
commercials every night in prime time.
 It’s
not in the public consciousness. The only real possibilities
are an under-marketed period piece Brothers Grimm,
first timer Steve Carrel’s questionable sex comedy The
40-year Old Virgin (editor’s
note: This piece was written prior to the release of 40-Year
Old Virgin), or the here-this-week-gone-the-next
chick power, biopic Domino, an R-rated action
fest that isn’t exactly going to bring the people in
(even if they knew when it was coming out), no matter how
good it is.
It’s understood that August to September are slow for
the movie business, with kids going back to school and work
schedules picking back up. In this part of the country, football
is king on Friday nights; but one has to begin to wonder what’s
to blame: People’s schedules, or the movie industry’s
schedule. Are you trying to tell me that if Mr. and
Mrs. Smith was released on September 2nd, it wouldn’t
crack $100 million by the end of its run? What about The
Longest Yard? Football during football season doesn’t
sound so bad to me, does it to you?
I’m just spit-balling here, but if you increase the
big name films during this span, you might just increase the
revenue during that span. Something about garbage in/garbage
out comes to mind. Movie companies expect theaters to be loyal
to them with high percentage rates during the summer, but
they show no sense of loyalty to the theaters when they give
them nothing to pay the mortgage with.
Who knew that cutting back on a British film about birds
fighting in WWII could throw the whole Fall into disarray?
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