BoxOffice® Pro - December 2011

BOOK IT! WE’VE PICKED THREE FILMS THAT MAY BE JUST A BIT UNDER THE RADAR > PAGE 44
®
WWW.BOXOFFICE.COM
$6.95
DEC. 2011
JUDE LAW AND
ROBERT DOWNEY JR.
AS WATSON
AND HOLMES
BY JOVE, WE’VE
DONE IT AGAIN
Watson and Sherlock return for the dastardly
good sequel Sherlock Holmes:
A Game of Shadows
INSIDE NATO PRESIDENT & CEO JOHN FITHIAN ON THE NC-17 RATING
WE ANSWER THE QUESTION: WHERE DID ALL THE TEENAGERS GO?
DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? RAVE RESCUES, RENOVATES & INVIGORATES
The Official Magazine of NATO

© 2011 Christie Digital Systems USA, Inc. All rights reserved.
Working with the leader makes it easy to move to digital. Christie ®
has 80 years of experience and more than 25,000 digital cinema
installations. We are the single source for all your digital cinema
needs. We offer an integrated solution from initial consultation
through to installation with 24x7 support and the lowest cost of
ownership. Our solutions exceed Academy and DCI standards,
and support exhibitors wanting to future-proof their investments
in anticipation of showing high frame rate (HFR) movies and
alternative content. Are you ready to make the move?
Visit Christie at
CineAsia 2011 | Booth #201
www.christiedigital.com/makethemove

DEC 2011 VOL. 147 NO. 12
BOXOFFICE MEDIA
PUBLISHER
Peter Cane
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Kenneth James Bacon
BOXOFFICE MAGAZINE
EDITOR
Amy Nicholson
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Sara Maria Vizcarrondo
INDUSTRY CONTRIBUTORS
Patrick Corcoran
John Fithian
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Cole Hornaday
J. Sperling Reich
GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Kevin O’Conner
PRODUCTION ASSISTANT
Ally McMurray
BOXOFFICE.COM / BOXOFFICEMAGAZINE.COM
EDITOR
Phil Contrino
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES
IN THIS SHERLOCK SEQUEL, THE FAMOUS DETECTIVE FINALLY FACES MORIARTY
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Alonso Duralde
Alex Edghill
David Ehrlich
Kate Erbland
Joe Galm
Daniel Garris
Todd Gilchrist
Ray Greene
Pete Hammond
Joseph Jon Lanthier
Ross A. Lincoln
Mark Olsen
Vadim Rizov
James Rocchi
Nick Schager
EDITORIAL INTERNS
20 NEW BUILDS
Do You Believe in Magic?
RAVE Cinemas rescues and
renovates an inner-city theater
Outside the Box The argument
for building boothless cinemas
26 THE BIG PICTURE
Mental Warfare In Sherlock
Holmes: A Game of Shadows,
the master sleuth has met his
match
The Girl Who Conquered
Hollywood Noomi Rapace’s
stunning rise to fame
The Face of Evil Only Jared
Harris’ Moriarty can give
Sherlock a scare
Desperatley Seeking Susan
Behind one lucky actor is the
woman who’s also his producer
4 Industry Briefs
6 Executive Suite
8 Running Numbers
10 Front Line Award
12 Front Office Award
14 Show Business
16 Marquee Award
40 On the Horizon
42 Coming Soon
44 Book It!
52 Classifieds
Inkoo Kang
Sterling Wong
ADVERTISING
DIRECTOR OF ADVERTISING
Ben Rosenstein
230 Park Ave., Ste. 1000
New York, NY 10169
212-627-7000 tel
866-902-7750 fax
ben@boxoffice.com
CIRCULATION INQUIRIES
Palm Coast Data
800-877-5207
boxofficemagazine@emailcustomerservice.com
EDITORIAL
9107 Wilshire Blvd., Ste. 450
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
310-876-9090 tel
866-902-7750 fax
MARKETING
Jonathan Margolis
the michael alan group
michael-alan.com
2 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

Only on the iPad
via iTunes
Insurance
Services
for the
Theatre
subscribe today!
Industry
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
opens on December 21, 2011
COMING IN DECEMBER TO BOXOFFICE.COM AND BOXOFFICEMAGAZINE.COM
BOXOFFICE’s WebWatch Data
Your customers are buzzing on the Internet about which movies they want to
see—and which ones they don’t. Use our new subscription service to predict
Hollywood’s hits and misses before they hit your theater.
Facebook & Twitter Tracking
Follow our daily tracking of activity on these two wildly popular social media sites.
Reviews
Will David Fincher manage to turn The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo into a mainstream
success? Read our review first to find out.
News-Reeling?
Let Boxoffice.com and BoxofficeMagazine.com digest all the reports and rumors
for you! Check our sites daily for breaking industry news.
BOXOFFICE PRO (ISSN 0006-8527) is published Monthly for $59.95 per year by Boxoffice Media, LLC, 9107 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 450,
Beverly Hills, CA 90210. Periodical Postage Paid at Beverly Hills, CA and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address
changes to: BOXOFFICE PRO, 9107 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 450, Beverly Hills , CA. ©2011 Boxoffice Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
MOC
Insurance
Services
THEATRE INSURANCE
SPECIALISTS
800 951 0600
San Francisco
www.mocins.com
license #0589960
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 3

INDUSTRY BRIEFS
In keeping with annual tradition,
Malco Theatres presents Wrapped
with Love for the continued research
of childhood diseases at Memphis’
own St. Jude Children’s Research
Hospital. Theater employees will be
selling bows hand-made from actual
film—about 24 frames, or one second
long—for $1.00 each. This program,
in its fourteenth year, kicked
off on Thanksgiving and runs through
Christmas Day at all 30 Malco Theatres
locations in Tennessee, Arkansas,
Missouri, Kentucky and Mississippi.
As the materials and volunteer
production hours for the bows are
donated, there is no cost to Malco
Theatres—the true beneficiary is St.
Jude Children’s Research Hospital. In
a joint effort for this cause, patients
of St. Jude and their families participate
in the creation of the bows at
the hospital. During the activity, reels
of movie trailers were cut, stapled
and sealed with a special sticker that
reads “Wrapped With Love...To Benefit
the Kids of St. Jude.” Since 1999,
Malco Theatres has raised almost
half a million dollars for St. Jude.
Over 73,000 bows were sold during
the 2010 Wrapped with Love campaign
and this year’s goal is to sell an
additional 75,000 of the collectible
film décor.
The Cinema Advertising Council
has elected Mark Mitchell as president
and chairman of the industry
association and Cliff Marks as executive
director. They join Bob Brouillette
and Laura Adler, returning as
treasurer and secretary, respectively.
The CAC also announced that Lee
Heffernan of Screenvision will take
over as chair of the Marketing committee
and Sunil Soman of NCM will
take over as chair of the Research
committee. Laura Adler will remain
chair of the Public Relations committee.
“It’s both an honor and pleasure
for me to be helping to lead the
CAC during this remarkable period in
marketing and advertising. With the
ongoing challenges that traditional
ad-supported television faces, the
in-theater environment is actually increasing
in relative value to brands,”
said Mr. Mitchell. “Cinema was the
original ‘first screen,’ and remains as
one of the most commercially-friendly
venues for marketers to connect
with consumers. Through the CAC
and its members, we will be working
to enhance that opportunity in ways
that build even greater return and
measurable results.”
Cineplex Entertainment will donate
$400,000 to the Starlight Children’s
Foundation after hosting its first-ever
National Community Day, held on
October 22nd. During the charity
even, Cineplex theatres across Canada
hosted a morning of free movies,
discounted snacks and other events
with 100 percent of the proceeds going
to Starlight. “Community Day is
one way we can say thank you to the
many communities that have been
so supportive of us over the years,
and simultaneously raise awareness
and funds for the Starlight Children’s
Foundation,” said Pat Marshall, vicepresident
of Communications and
Investor Relations, Cineplex Entertainment.
“We are overwhelmed by
the generosity of our guests and our
Community Day partners who helped
make this event such a success. We
look forward to doing it again next
year.” Warner Bros. Pictures Canada
donated the movies that were enjoyed
on Community Day, RealD
donated 50,000 pairs of 3D glasses,
and Mars and Wrigley Canada donated
a portion of the candy that was
sold.
GDC Technology has signed a
digital cinema server contract
with Harkins Theatres, the largest
privately held cinema chain in North
America, to deploy nearly 400 SX-
2000A Digital Cinema Servers with
Integrated Media Block. “It’s very
encouraging to be entrusted to
digitalize the entire circuit for such a
renowned theater chain as Harkins,”
said Dr. Man-Nang Chong, founder
and CEO of GDC Tech. In addition,
GDC Technology has also signed an
agreement with Landmark Cinemas
of Canada Inc., the largest independent
exhibitor in Western Canada,
for 100 SX-2000A Digital Cinema
Servers. Said Neil Campbell, COO
and Partner of Landmark, “We could
not be more excited and confident
to have such strong, responsible, and
reliable companies as our partners,
as we move out of film and into the
world of digital.”
Les Cinémas Guzzo, one of Canada’s
leading independent chains and the
largest privately owned cinema chain
in Quebec, is going 100 percent
digital with its recent purchase of
projectors, support and services from
Christie. With installation managed inhouse
and supported by Christie, the
conversion of all 142 Guzzo screens is
planned for completion by April 2012.
“In addition to the terrific image quality
offered by digital projection, the
conversion will give us more flexibility
in the types of presentation we can
offer, such as 3D and 2D, and more
personalized pre-show and alternative
content,” says Vincenzo Guzzo,
executive vice president and chief operating
officer, Cinémas Guzzo.
AMC Entertainment Inc. has been
selected as the Lead Employer of
the Year by the US Business Leadership
Network at the 2011 USBLN
Annual Leadership Awards Dinner,
which honors companies who promote
disability diversity. This year,
AMC created a new national employment
outreach program, FOCUS
(Furthering Opportunities, Cultivating
Untapped Strengths), which is
designed to encourage and facilitate
the hiring of people with disabilities
at AMC Theatres. The program,
which has gone from one participating
theater to more than 70 in just a
few months, continues to grow and
has helped move the company well
beyond compliance, more than doubling
the number of people with disabilities
in its employ. “We at AMC
take great pride in fostering a work
environment that’s not only inclusive,
but supportive of all our associates
at every level in the company,”
said Keith Wiedenkeller, senior vice
president and chief people officer at
AMC. “The award is a reflection of
the dedication by all of our associates
to maintaining that work environment.”
4 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

Come imm
Enjoy cinema like never before!
Be part of a new era in the movie industry with the amazing imm 3D sound technology
It’s immersive, it’s immpressive, it’s imm Sound ®
www.immsound.com
Visit us at CineAsia at our distributor’s booth 311
www.gdc-tech.com

EXECUTIVE SUITE
JOHN
FITHIAN
NATO
President
and Chief
Executive
Officer
THERE’S AN NC-17 IN SHAME
NATO has long urged serious motion picture producers
and distributors not to shy away from movies
that will receive an NC-17 rating from the Classification
and Ratings Administration. Every rating in the system
has an appropriate purpose. Some movies, though they
may contain important and artistic content, should
simply not be seen by children under any circumstances.
Congratulations are due, then, to Fox Searchlight and Director
Steve McQueen for releasing Shame—an acclaimed
raw portrayal of a sex addict—under the NC-17 rating. I
encourage every exhibitor to exhibit the movie in those
markets where they believe it has commercial appeal.
As one important disclaimer, I hadn’t yet seen the
movie at the time this column was due to go to press.
By the time you read this, though, I will have attended
a screening of the movie at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles
to show my support. I do know that the movie received
glowing reviews and publicity during its very successful
exhibition at many film festivals, including San Sebastian,
Telluride, Toronto, New York, London and Venice (where
the movie’s lead actor,
Michael Fassbender,
received the Best Actor
award).
Shame is set in New
York City and graphically
portrays the life of
a desperate sex addict,
played by Fassbender. His
sister (Carey Mulligan of
Wall Street 2 ) interrupts
her brother’s private life
when she arrives unannounced
to stay with him. The sister both exposes her
brother’s problems, and reveals some of her own. According
to reports, the movie has a great deal of frontal nudity,
straight sex, group sex and gay sex and suggestions of
incest between the siblings. A grisly suicide attempt adds
to the intensity.
Fox Searchlight’s co-presidents, Steve Gilula and Nancy
Utley, were shaken and moved when they first saw the
movie and shortly thereafter announced their acquisition
of its rights. Steve later contacted me to inform NATO that
Fox Searchlight anticipated an NC-17 rating, that they and
the filmmaker were committed to releasing the movie in
its original form, and that they had intense confidence in
the power of their movie. Shame opens on December 2.
We do not pretend that there is no consequence
whatsoever from an NC-17 rating. Obviously, there is one
absolute consequence—patrons under the age of 18 cannot
attend the movie, even if accompanied by a parent or
guardian. The official description of the rating follows:
NC-17: NO ONE 17 AND UNDER ADMITTED
But no shame in the NC-17
If studios and filmmakers
don’t make and release
more NC-17 movies,
the rating system may
eventually collapse
on itself…
These are films that the Rating Board believes most
parents would consider patently too adult for their children.
No children will be admitted. NC-17 does not mean
“obscene” or “pornographic” and should not be construed
as a negative judgment on the content of the film. The rating
simply signals that the content is appropriate only for
an adult audience. An NC-17 rating can be based on violence,
sex, aberrational behavior, drug abuse or any other
element that most parents would consider too strong and
therefore off-limits for viewing by their children.
Beyond the application of that rule, however, most of
the perceived consequences of an NC-17 constitute little
more than myth. Because they have been described as certainties
over and over by uninformed and lazy reporters,
two myths in particular need to be strenuously corrected.
Here are the truths:
CINEMA OPERATORS WILL PLAY MOVIES RATED
NC-17 WHERE THEY HAVE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
The most dangerous myth is that cinema operators
maintain rules against
the exhibition of movies
rated NC-17. We have discussed
this many times
over the years with our
members. At one juncture
we even surveyed
nearly 100 exhibition
representatives and three
indicated that they would
never play NC-17 movies.
In other words, this first
myth is 97 percent false.
To be certain, few exhibitors will offer copious screen
time just to prove a point. Movies have to have commercial
appeal to warrant play dates. But that axiom holds
true for movies in every rating category, not just the NC-
17. Historically, movies rated NC-17 have performed okay
at the box office. The total gross of Showgirls (1995) tops
the list at $20.3 million, while three other NC-17 movies—Henry
& June (1990), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and
Her Lover (1990) and Bad Education (2004)—grossed more
than $5 million. Eight other movies (including awardwinning
director Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) at $4.6
million) have grossed more than $1 million under the
NC-17. Of the 20 total movies released as NC-17 movies,
only eight have failed to gross $1 million.
The average gross for NC-17 rated movies to date is
$3.4 million. Though modest, that performance record
exceeds the performance of unrated movies, which gross
on average less than $2 million. And I firmly believe that
if more serious filmmakers and distributors released
movies as NC-17 movies, the growth potential would be
substantial. It is the lack of commercial movies released
6 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

that holds down the economic potential of the NC-17 rating, not the
willingness of exhibitors to play the movies.
MOVIES RATED NC-17 ARE AFFORDED THE ADVERTISING
OPPORTUNITIES THEY NEED TO REACH THE CONSUMER
The second, almost perpetual myth clouding the NC-17 rating is
that media outlets won’t carry advertisements for movies so rated. The
most traditional of all advertising media, newspapers, generally have
no policies against running ads for NC-17 movies. When Fox Searchlight
released The Dreamers as an NC-17 movie in 2004, President Steve
Gilula stated publicly that they were able to place ads for the movie
almost everywhere they targeted them. A newspaper in Utah flatly
refused advertisements for NC-17 movies, but that was about all. At the
other end of the technology spectrum, the Internet offers an easy and
effective way to market movies. According to the Hollywood Reporter,
Utley says the Internet, still in its infancy when Dreamers was released,
should make a difference this time. “It will be pretty easy for us to
create noise about Shame by releasing materials online,” Utley told the
Reporter. “The communities that would support this type of movie are
much more organized than when we released Dreamers.”
So if exhibitors will play NC-17 movies where they believe they
can sell tickets, and if distributors can effectively market those
movies, why won’t more studios make and release movies with the
NC-17 rating? The most restrictive ratings in other territories do not
impede the commercial viability of the movies. Shame will receive
an 18 rating in the United Kingdom, which will similarly prevent
anyone under the age of 18 from patronizing the movie. Yet there
will be no stigma attached there because of that rating.
Perhaps American movie rating history is unique. The Motion Picture
Association of America and NATO created a rating system in 1968
that included the “X” rating for adult movies which children should
not be allowed to see. Regrettably, no copyrights were obtained for the
individual ratings and the pornography industry appropriated the use
of the “X” for their products. Then “X” became “XXX” as pornographers
destroyed the viability of the rating for commercial, artistic movies.
In 1990, the MPAA and NATO replaced the X rating with the
NC-17 category. The new designation took effect immediately and
was copyrighted so that pornographers could not use the rating.
Somehow, the industry and our patrons have never fully overcome
the misimpressions and myths surrounding the newest rating designation.
Hopefully, with more movies like Shame, we will.
I will conclude with one last concern: if studios and filmmakers
don’t make and release more NC-17 movies, the rating system may
eventually collapse on itself, opening the door back to censorship by
government. The rating system constitutes a spectrum. When one
slices a spectrum, there is always a slice at the end, and the NC-17
rating constitutes that end slice—one that requires an absolute prohibition
on attendance by children. For the system to maintain its
integrity, every category must be used. Every slice must be relevant.
Today, without confidence in the NC-17, some distributors will
trim and cut and edit their movie to cram it down into the R category.
The result, frankly, is that the R category is now too broad. In
my opinion, some “hard Rs” should be NC-17s.
I am encouraged by Fox Searchlight’s belief in their movie
Shame and wish them well. We need more serious movie-makers to
follow their lead.
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 7

RUNNING NUMBERS
PATRICK
CORCORAN
NATO
Director of
Media &
Research
California
Operations
Chief
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST
It is curious to me that an industry that is so intensively
covered in the trade and mainstream press—our weekend
box office numbers hit the wires before the weekend
ends, and the trade press and blogs start reporting numbers
before even Friday is done—should be analyzed so
poorly and so lazily. It has long been this way. The very
availability of so much data, combined with the increasing
availability of people who don’t know what to make
of that data, makes for some dismal reporting.
Anybody remember the Great Moviegoing Slump
of 2005? Week after week, a large swath of the media
breathlessly reported the unflattering weekend box
office comparisons to the previous year. Ten weeks!
Twelve! Hollywood slump extends to 16 weeks! Speculation
ran rampant. “Are Audiences Abandoning the Movie
Theater?” Was the wide popularity of DVDs eroding
interest in moviegoing? Well, no.
It turns out that the height of the hysteria coincided
rather perfectly with the end of a decline in box office
and admissions, plus the puncturing of the DVD bubble.
Since 2005, domestic annual box office has increased
20 percent, while revenues in the home market have
decreased 13.36 percent over the same period. Note also
that home revenues
from first-run
theatrical were less
over the last two
years than gross
box office.
Theatrical
admissions have
been more erratic,
but are equally
immune to rational
analysis. Almost
any reporting you
can think of will
note the latest admissions numbers and, if they were
down, find the last year that admissions were roughly
the same and note that admissions have been flat since
X-year. We saw this at the end of 2010, when admissions
fell over five percent to 1.339 billion. Mainstream media—and
even some trades—solemnly intoned that theatrical
admissions have been flat since 1997. This is true
if you ignore that admissions were up over five percent
the year before, that they reached over 1.5 billion twice
(the first time admissions had hit that level since the late
’50s), had since fallen, risen, been flat and risen. I wonder
how the media would analyze a ride on a roller coaster?
I was reminded of this kind of thought-free analysis
by a couple of recent examples. Just before the end of the
summer season (it wouldn’t do to wait until the numbers
were actually in), the New York Times reported a record
at the summer box office, but alas led with the news
The Devil is in the details
For the record,
that—wait for it—“Attendance for the period is projected
to total about 543 million, the lowest tally since the summer
of 1997, when 540 million people turned up.”
Never mind that it was the highest summer box office
ever recorded, or that it was the fifth straight summer to
take in over $4 billion. And let’s also not notice that the
summer box office total for 2011 reported by the Times
was too low, that the admissions for 2010 were based on
box office numbers that were too high—and when NATO
released the actual box office and estimated attendance figures,
the Times neither acknowledged them, nor corrected
the earlier story. Expect the bogus numbers to live on.
(For the record, 2011 summer box office was $4.4 billion,
up 4.4 percent, and attendance was 550.56 million,
up 1.8 percent.)
It is also worth noting the next time you see the media
reporting year-to-date box office—which is currently
down 4.4 percent—that we began the year with a first
quarter that was down 22 percent. The second quarter
was up 4.4 percent, the third quarter up 5.8 percent and
overall box office since the end of the first quarter is up
2.7 percent. And isn’t that the big story behind the numbers
that hasn’t been reported?
Which brings
me to the latest
piece of egregious
box office analysis.
On October 23,
Deadline Hollywood
led off with
this head-scratcher
in its weekend
box office wrap:
“Hollywood’s scary
three months of
slumping North
American box office
is officially over—appropriately enough at the start
of Halloweek.” I was puzzled, to say the least, when I
read this. I looked back over my numbers and found that
box office had been up 11 of the previous 14 weeks going
back to mid-July. Scary slump, indeed—like a ghost, it
must be invisible.
As David Poland put it two weeks later on The Hot Blog,
“Want to know the reality of the last three months? August
was up $20m from 2010. We had the biggest September
in history, the first ever over $600m, and up $58m from
2010. And October was down $79m from 2010. All-in-all,
business is off by $1m in the last three months. SLUMP!!!”
The kicker? The box office on the weekend Deadline
Hollywood declared the slump “officially over” was
down 6.28 percent.
But don’t expect that sort of reality-based assessment
to intrude on Deadline’s analysis any time soon. On No-
2011 summer box office was
$4.4 billion, up 4.4%;
attendance was 550.56
million, up 1.8%.
8 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

vember 5, Deadline led off its Saturday morning spin thusly: “Hang
on tight, folks, because this is turning into a bumpy ride. North
American box office is still unsettlingly weak just as it’s been since
the beginning of August.” In other words, the non-existent slump
which had ended two weeks before had never ended.
Now, it should surprise no one when they hear the sharp whine
of axes being ground, the creak of hobby horses being ridden or the
soft whispers of agendas being pushed by and through the media.
3D is a case in point. I’ve looked at the strange and un-illuminating
ways that industry analysts have looked at how 3D
should be considered. In my September Boxoffice column arguing
against a popular flawed metric—percentage of box office in
3D—I suggested that a far simpler and more illuminating measure
is whether movies are making more money in 3D than they were
before. Slate magazine took another tack in an article entitled
“Who Killed 3D?” suggesting that the average gross per screen in
3D is the proper metric. But is it? Let’s plot all three measures on a
single chart:
80.00
60.00
40.00
20.00
0
HTTYD
Shrek
Forever
After
Thor
POTC 4
KFP 2
Green
Lantern
Transformers 3
Cars 2
Harry Potter 7.2
3D Box Office
3D Percentage
3D Screen Percentage
Now, let’s add in screen counts and per screen averages for 2D
and 3D:
same gross in a 100-seater or a 700-seater. What we do know is that
Harry Potter 7.2 sold nearly 25 percent more tickets in 3D than did
Transformers 3 on only 2 percent more screens.
We are also in a completely different environment than we
were in a year ago. In August of 2010, there were 6,286 3D screens
in North America at 2,558 locations; a year later, there were 12,738
3D screens at 3,015 locations. The number of locations offering 3D
increased by 17.1 percent and the number of screens increased a
staggering 102.6 percent. So what’s going on?
A year ago, if you were interested in seeing a movie in 3D, you
had to see it in a limited number of places with a limited number
of screens devoted to 3D. Consequently, those screens were far
more likely to sell out. Today, there are far more screens available
to watch a 3D movie—and there might even be more than one
3D movie available for you to watch. What you’re seeing, in other
words, is the logic of the multiplex.
There are a lot more screens available to show a 3D movie, most
of them in locations that already had at least one 3D screen a year
ago. What does this accomplish? The same thing that offering multiple
auditoriums in a complex with multiple showtimes does with
2D movies: choice to consumers and the possibility of maximizing
revenues by making that choice available.
The modern multiplex offers a range of sizes of auditorium,
which allows theater owners greater flexibility and the opportunity
to maximize each available seat. Consider a single screen
with 1,000 seats. That auditorium can offer, say, four showings a
night (for the sake of argument at 5:00, 7:30, 10:00 and 12:30) for a
possible 4,000 ticket sales. In a multiplex, say, with 14 screens, the
same movie might be scheduled in four auditoriums with seating
375, 275, 200 and 150, respectively (again, 1,000 seats). With staggered
start times, those screens can show the movie sixteen times
while offering the same 4,000 possible tickets. This increases the
likelihood of selling the maximum number of tickets, because you
are offering customers a broader range of choices that matches
more precisely their scheduling needs. But you have a lower per
screen average.
MOVIE
3D
SCREENS
3D BOX OFFICE
(MILLIONS)
3D PER
SCREEN
AVERAGE
2D
SCREENS
2D BOX OFFICE
(MILLIONS)
2D PER
SCREEN
AVERAGE
How to Train Your Dragon 2,363 $29.70 $12,568 4,442 $14.0 $3,151
Shrek Forever After 3,394 $43.30 $12,757 6,106 $27.5 $4,507
Thor 3,909 $39.60 $10,130 3,741 $26.4 $7,057
Pirates of the Caribbean 4 3,964 $42.60 $10,746 4,136 $48.6 $11,758
Kung Fu Panda 2 3,979 $30.60 $7,690 3,521 $37.4 $10,623
Green Lantern 3,200 $23.70 $7,406 4,000 $29.0 $7,246
Cars 2 3,140 $27.10 $8,630 4,550 $41.0 $8,980
Transformers 3 4,146 $57.60 $13,892 5,154 $40.1 $7,788
Harry Potter 7.2 4,250 $72.67 $17,098 6,750 $96.1 $14,233
The per-screen averages for 3D are also un-illuminating. We do
not know, for instance, what size auditoriums were playing in 3D
or 2D for any particular movie—in other words, a $15,000 weekend
gross in a 350-seat auditorium is a different thing than the
I won’t trot out the old chestnut that figures don’t lie, but liars
figure. But numbers are extremely flexible—you can arrange them
to show what you want them to show. The question is: why do you
want them to show that?
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 9

FRONT LINE AWARD
RAISING THE BAR
Pour one out for Michigan
Tending bar at an Emagine Entertainment location is nothing
like working at the corner pub. Even the hiring process is
unconventional, sometimes even covert. For Novi, Michigan facility
bartender Jackie Sledz, the opportunity caught her completely
off guard.
“I knew her husband, Craig,” says Emagine General Manager
Gary Butske, Jr. “She had a job doing some telemarketing. I knew
she had pretty good customer service skills and wanted to get
out of doing that so I told her, ‘Hey, why don’t you go see our
bar supervisor and interview with him and see if you can get a
bartender position.’”
At Emagine a lack of bartending experience is anything but a
detriment—in fact, it’s
a point in your favor.
“That’s the kind of employee
we want working
in our theater bar,”
says Butske. “Somebody
that doesn’t have
any bad habits or tendencies
that normal
bartenders have. We
want somebody who
can turn over our customers
very quickly
but still give them
good customer service
while they’re there.”
Unaware of her
friendship with
Butske, the bar supervisor
instantly took to
Sledz’s pluck and positive
personality. “We
tend to hire the smile
and not skill,” says Butske. “We can always train somebody to do a
job, but we’re always looking for that individual that is willing to
give us a little bit more from the customer standpoint so that we
are giving the customer the best entertainment experience.”
Over five years later and Sledz is a veteran Emagine bartender,
something she marvels over daily. “I originally went to school to
study Criminal Justice,” she muses. “I wanted to be a probation
officer.” But before finishing her degree, Sledz had the foresight
to know Criminal Justice was not her calling. “I know it’s a high
stress job. I always thought I would rather be happy in life. I just
don’t want to live like that. I’d rather come home and be in a good
mood and be happy than to come home stressed out every day.”
by Cole Hornaday
In a marketplace of perpetual downsizing, where people kills
seem to be the least important tool set on a resume, it’s a rarity
to meet someone who finds joy in simply making others happy.
That’s no mean feat, especially when your patrons are the social
strata hardest bit by the recession. “The economy here in Michigan
is really bad,” says Sledz, “so this is a way for cheap entertainment—these
people can come in and grab a drink and relax for a
little bit and I think it’s great. It’s a great concept and a great idea.”
Unlike conventional watering holes where patrons are encouraged
to linger, the Emagine bar is a more of a pit stop en route to
your final destination. Patrons are frequently on the move juggling
drinks and concessions, intent on making their film on time.
“They’ll probably
see more customers
at the bar on a busy
night than a regular
bartender will see on
Jackie Sledz
Bartender
Emagine
Entertainment, Inc.
Novi, MI
Nominated by
Ruth Daniels,
Sr. Vice President,
Sales & Marketing
Emagine
Entertainment, Inc.
a regular weekend
because they’ll deal
with multiple shows
and multiple sets of
customers coming in
and out,” says Butske.
Not surprising,
Sledz’s unrelenting
charm keeps Emagine
patrons flowing along
her bar like a conga
line. She swears she
couldn’t keep up the
clip were it not for
the support of her
team. “I’ve made great
friends,” says Sledz. “I
have a great boss that
I work for and this is where I met my best friend. This is a great
group of people to work with and that’s what has kept me there.”
After two years of marriage, Sledz and her husband Craig are
two birds ready to start nesting. The pair is house-hunting, intent
on raising a brood despite the uncertain climate ahead. Sledz is
undaunted and says she feels positive about her job, her friends
and her future.
“I plan to stay where I’m at, to be honest with you,” she says. “I
love being a bartender. Did I ever see this happening? No I didn’t
but I love what I do. I will say it until I’m blue in the face: I’d rather
come home in a good mood than make a million dollars and come
home crabby. Life is just way too short.”
BOXOFFICE PRO is looking for winners—theater employees you consider to be genuine role models making a significant, positive impact on your theater operations. Monthly winners of
the BOXOFFICE PRO Front Line Award receive a $50 Gap Gift Card! To nominate a theater employee send a brief 100- to 200-word nominating essay to cole@boxoffice.com. Be sure to
put ‘Front Line Nomination’ in the subject line.
10 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

FRONT OFFICE AWARD
BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE
Festival organizer is no couch potato
Talking with Couch Fest Films’ Craig Downing via Skype from
Wroclaw, Poland is a riot. His vigorous wit is enough to reignite
a dying star. You’d never suspect him of being on the verge of
adrenal collapse.
A self-proclaimed media addict, the erstwhile musician-turnedfilmmaker
and festival organizer has wandered a bohemian path
leading from Austin to Seattle to Reykjavík, Iceland in search
of a creative community. Says Downing, “Austin is that kind of
creatively manic city where you get on the bus to go to work, but
then you wind up meeting your future band mates and then going
home to start a band after quitting your job. All in the same day.”
Upon arriving in Seattle in 2004, Downing was dismayed to
learn the Emerald City was far more reserved than anticipated. “I
was really impressed with
the film community and
started to think about how to
get Seattleites to get off the
cold horse and get down and
talk to each other a little bit,”
says Downing. “The coziest
place I can think of is the
living room and I love films
and I have no attention span.
Why don’t I play shorts in
peoples’ living rooms?”
Taking the deceptively
simple formula to his
contacts in the local film
community, Downing began
drawing together material
for the world’s most international
one-day film festival. Couch Fest was born.
From 2008 to 2009, Couch Fest was centered in Seattle, but by
its third year the festival had expanded globally. “It was crazy and
I wish I was making this up,” says Downing. “I was stranded on an
island in Belize with this 18-year-old drunk pirate trying to do web
updates in the middle of the film festival with a satellite modem
that was slower than my parent’s dial-up.”
Downing soon found the future of Couch Fest hinged on
sponsorship over location. “Seattle has a sister city in Reykjavík,
Iceland,” he chuckles, “I love Iceland. I spent a month camping
there 10 years ago and cried every day I was so happy.”
On a lark, Downing decided to pitch Couch Fest to the Film
Board of Reykjavík while on location in Haiti. “I wrote this rambling
email to the Reykjavík International Film Festival telling
them that we should work together. I think I even used the word
‘manifesto’ in there—I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”
To Downing’s shock and amazement, the Icelanders were warm
to the idea and he booked a flight to Reykjavík for him and his
single-intern staff.
by Cole Hornaday
Downing says organizing Couch Fest is very much a low-tech
affair: no direct digital signal, no satellite feeds, just a great deal of
emailing, hovering over Google Forums spreadsheets and persistent
prayers the international mail will deliver on time.
“We book everything by putting it up on Facebook,” says
Downing. “We put it up on our newsletters, and we Twitter the
hell out of it. We’re not very efficient. Some businesses like the low
touch and we’re, like, the opposite.”
Between 11AM to 7PM (time zones being relative) on September
24, 2011, festival sponsors slid a 90-minute DVD into their
players and the fourth installment of Couch Fest International
went “live” in 24 living rooms from Portland, Oregon to Warsaw,
Poland. The festival’s fare is an eclectic mix, the quality of which
Downing says he would
Craig Downing
Founder & Director
Couch Fest Films
From Reykjavik,
Iceland to Wroclaw,
Poland and Beyond
Nominated by
Ryan Davis,
Communications
Director &
Development
Associate
Northwest Film
Forum, Seattle, WA
defend to his dying breath.
“These are filmmakers
that have either maxed out
their credit cards, lost their
girlfriends and boyfriends, or
haven’t talked to their families
in months to make these
films,” says Downing. “These
are films from the Seattle
International Film Festival,
the Toronto International
Film Festival, the Melbourne
International Film Festival or
the part of the New Horizons
here in Europe.”
Depending heavily on
sponsor volunteerism, profit
was never Couch Fest’s angle. Dubbing themselves a “for-loss-ofprofit
group,” hosts are welcome to charge a nominal admission
for their efforts but Downing has faith that they, like he, are in it
for the love of film.
Looking back, Downing feels Couch Fest 2011 was a success.
“You look at the pictures from Slovakia and there’s like five people
on the couch. Someone might think: ‘Oh, wow, only five people
on the couch—that sucks!’ All I know is that there was some dude
in Slovakia that said, ‘Hey, I can’t watch really bad-ass films where
I’m from, but me and my four other friends want to watch bad-ass
films, can you hook us up?’ and I say, ‘Absolutely! Yes!’”
Though Couch Fest’s future is in limbo, Downing is optimistic.
“Realistically, it’s based on whatever sponsor wants to put money
on the table that dictates where we’ll be based next. Right now
we’re waiting to see what is the most bassackwards location you
can think of—that’s where we’ll probably wind up.”
For the time being, Downing and company are taking a muchdeserved
breather. “Right now we’re in Poland recovering and
celebrating that our lymph nodes didn’t explode from the stress.”
12 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

MOVING PICTURES. FORWARD.
More than
2,500
Dolby ® Surround 7.1
screens installed
More than
8,600
Dolby 3D systems
shipped
More than
11,000
cinema servers
shipped
Working to bring you the next generation of digital cinema.
Learn more at www.dolby.com.
Dolby and the double-D symbol are registered trademarks of Dolby Laboratories. © 2011 Dolby Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. S11/24646/25041

SHOW BUSINESS
PHIL
CONTRINO
Editor
Boxoffice.com
WHERE DID ALL THE TEENAGERS GO?
Since this past August, I’ve been consistently hit
with questions from the mainstream media about
the apparent lack of teenage interest in showing up to
movie theaters. Frankly, I’m not surprised. Not because
I think teens aren’t going to the movies anymore—The
Twilight Saga, anyone?—but rather because the media
loves to write “Chicken Little” stories about the exhibition
industry.
Yet there does seem to be an alarming trend in which
teen-skewing flicks are falling way short of expectations.
To cite a few recent examples: Prom managed only $10.1
million domestically during its entire run, teen icon Zac
Efron pushed Charlie St. Cloud to a paltry $31.2 million
haul and Taylor Lautner couldn’t use his Twilight fame to
propel Abduction to even the $30 million plateau.
Two big culprits are to blame: movie theft and a bad
economy. No, it’s not the content. Far worse movies have
been made for this audience in the past and the industry
had no problem raking it in. Go back and watch some of
the movies you loved when you were 15—and prepare
to cringe.
But children today have it bred into them that content
can—and even should—be free. But, as I often explain to
people I encounter who watch movies online for free, if
The question plaguing the film industry
you keep taking things without paying, then eventually
there won’t be anything you want to take. That’s not a
world I want to live in. I don’t want to see all Hollywood
productions reduced to low-budget efforts simply because
the money isn’t there. I’m relieved that NATO and
MPAA head Chris Dodd are taking the issue very seriously,
as every time I hear them speak out on the movie
theft problem, I get a new sense of pride working in this
industry. Piracy can be squashed.
Unfortunately, the weak economy is largely beyond
our control. As bad as the economy is for adults, it’s
worse for teens. The cost of living has risen so much that
a part-time job in high school doesn’t accomplish what
it once did. And I’ve seen unemployment numbers for
teens pegged as high as 25 percent—and I’m sure the real
number is higher because, let’s face
it, there’s a disturbing amount of
fact-fudging going on in economic
reporting. With that statistic in
mind, it becomes easy to understand
the recent wave of teenskewing
failures: if your audience
doesn’t have disposable income,
then they can’t buy your product.
There’s no question that a lack
of teen support is a challenge the
exhibition industry must face. Not
only does it hurt business now, but
it hurts it in the future. Instilling
a love of the cinematic experience
in new generations is essential
to keeping this business alive,
and that’s hard to do if teens can’t
get to the movies. It’s important
to remember that watching a
downloaded movie online is a form
of settling. When presented with
two options, nobody would choose
grainy-handheld over grandlycinematic.
We still have that on
our side.
Excuse this schmaltzy recommendation,
but I really do feel that
everyone reading this should use
going to the movies as a way to
bond with younger family members. That’s how we’ll instill
that passion. I’ve been taking my 17-year-old brother
to the movies for a decade, and now he’s begging me to go
see Margin Call at the local arthouse. And yes, that also
fills me with a sense of pride.
Exhibitors can also take it upon themselves to bring
some teens back to theaters. Offer cheaper concessions
with student IDs, show discounted midnight movies.
Investing in them and you invest in your own business.
14 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

MARQUEE AWARD
Less is More
Downsizing becomes “right-sizing”
by Cole Hornaday
AmStar Cinemas 14
Dallas, Texas
16 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

LAP OF LUXURY
Rescaled, remodeled—but in no way reduced
in the way of amenities—AmStar Cinemas 14
features all-digital projection and sound, wallto-wall
screens, and high-back stadium seating
rocker chairs, as well as a birthday party and
game room.
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 17

THE CUT THAT COUNTS
Back row, left to right: Eric Kullander, Southern Theatres; Jack Wagner, Southern Theatres; Doug Whitford, Southern Theatres; Jodi Pine, Southern Theatres;
Ron Krueger II, Southern Theatres; Greg Silvers, Entertainment Properties Trust; Monica R. Alonzo, Dallas Council, District 6 (cutting the ribbon); George
Solomon, Southern Theatres. Front row: Ellias Vanegas, Southern Theatres (left, holding film reel and ribbon) and Artela Lofton, Southern Theatres (right,
holding film reel and ribbon).
… bigger landscapes, bigger
skies, bigger movie theaters.
Naturally, the exhibitors of the
Lone Star state were the first to
coin the term “megaplex.”
When AMC rolled out the Grand
Cinemas 24 in May of 1995, the
5,000-seat Dallas theater was monolithic
even by today’s standards. “We bought
The Grand in 1997, but it was a division of
the leadership of AMC at the time,” says
Brian Moriarity, vice president of corporate
communications at Entertainment
Properties Trust. “There was an opportunity
to bring together and create a theater
destination and it wound up being very
successful—and a model that’s played out
over and over and over.”
Perhaps the Grand’s model was too successful.
In no time, other jumbo cinemas
dotted the landscape, drawing away the
numbers vital to keeping the massive construct
rolling. And as the prosperous economic
climate of the late 1990s became
tenuous, the megaplex concept began to
lose viability as a business model.
After nearly 15 years in business, rows
of empty seats became a common sight at
the Grand 24. Though patronage was thin,
a wave of sadness passed over the community
when word hit the newswire that the
Grand 24 would be closing its doors in the
spring of 2010.
However, instead of shuttering their
doors forever, current owners Southern
Theatres L.L.C. partnered with Entertainment
Properties Trust took stock of the
Grand 24’s position in the community and
AmStar 14 hopes to
bring not only joy
and entertainment
to the community,
but also ample
employment
opportunities.
began an intense reevaluation to develop
a leaner, more economical AmStar 14.
Rather than blame the local economy
for the Grand 24’s closing, owners of the
new AmStar 14 chose to see the space as
one in a process of evolution and refinement,
a place ripe for right-sizing. “I think
it’s important to look at each operator
individually and understand that each has
its own separate set of business circumstances
and to not generalize too much
from a category perspective,” says Moriarity.
“When you look at category growth
and revenue growth, it’s really done an
outstanding job. The area has changed
with competition coming in and the demographics
of the area changing.”
“We’ve got a good understanding of
the economics of the area as it is now,”
says Ron Krueger II, Southern Theatres
Chief Operations Officer. “Because of
a greater understanding of attendance
levels, we felt it was still a very viable
location to come back in and right-size
and reinvest.”
The question arises: when right-sizing
a facility from 24 to 14 auditoriums,
what’s to be done with all the surplus real
estate? Enter Toby Keith’s I Love This
Bar and Grill. The country-singer-turnedrestaurateur’s
food-and-a-show venues
have been a tremendous success from Las
Vegas to Massachusetts, making it an ideal
neighbor for the re-purposed cinema.
Opening a few months in advance
of the Toby Keith’s, anticipation of the
pairing is high. “No doubt there will be
some opportunities to find ways to work
together,” says Moriarity. “For example,
mom and dad might decide to spend the
18 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

evening with a concert and
a meal over at Toby Keith’s
while the kids are hanging out
on the other side watching a
movie.”
One unforeseen selling
point of facility’s rebirth was
nostalgia. “Every Dallas native
who was living there from ‘95
until today who came through
that theater last week when
we were giving our sneak peak
tour said ‘I came here every
Saturday in high school or
college,’ or ‘This is where I had
my first date!’” says AmStar
Media Contact Justin Scott.
Needless to say, the rightsizing
of Amstar 14 also
includes state-of-art exhibition
niceties like stadium highback
rocking chairs in all its 14 auditoriums,
six of which are built for 3D digital
projectors controlled from an iPod Touch.
In redefining its place as an entertainment
hub, AmStar 14 anticipates becoming
a more culturally diverse venue and
seeks to meet the needs of Dallas’ growing
Hispanic community. “They have
voiced their appreciation that we and our
partners are reinvesting in the area, and
through that hopefully revitalizing the
area,” says Moriarity. “We believe in it and
we think it’s going to be a cool and unique
experience and will demonstrate definitely
our commitment.”
Case in point, on AmStar 14’s October
14 opening weekend, the theater featured
nostalgic new reboots like Footloose and
The Thing alongside screenings of the
Spanish-language film Labios Rojas (Red
Lips).
AmStar 14 also hopes to bring not only
joy and entertainment to the community,
but also ample employment opportunities.
“We’ve initially hired up to 80 total
employees at this point and as we get into
the holiday season we expect that to get
into the low 100s,” says Moriarity.
Whether AmStar’s right-sizing process
is the shape of things to come, or just a
great experiment, only time can tell. “I
know that it’s not extremely common and
so to some degree we may be proving out
a theory,” says Moriarity. “But we’re confident
that it will work. It just requires the
right combination of partners and design
and the right area.”
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME?
Former Grand 24 megaplex, the AmStar Cinemas 14 could be the glimpse of things to come, as former
large-scale cinemas right-size for tomorrow.
For five generations the Cretors family has been making concessions
more profitable. The new MACH 5 popper is our latest combination
of innovation and ease-of-use that can give you years of higher-margin
popcorn sales.
The MACH 5’s exclusive one-piece lid ensures maximum corn expansion.
Its clean-in-place kettle makes cleaning fast and easy. And the optional,
programmable LED sign can flash any sales message.
You can choose the MACH
5 that’s most efficient for your
spot: 3 ft., 4 ft., 5 ft. and 6 ft.
cabinets are available, as well
as a counter model. Add a
32, 48 or 60 oz. kettle, then
customize with some of the
dozen options.
Call Shelly Olesen for all the
details: 777-433-7425.
www.cretors.com
MACH11
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 19

NEW BUILDS
DO YOU BELIEVE IN
MAGIC?
RAVE CINEMAS RESCUES AND
RENOVATES AN INNER-CITY THEATER
RAVE CINEMAS BALDWIN HILLS CRENSHAW PLAZA 15
BY J. SPERLING REICH
IF YOU REBUILD IT
THE EXTERIOR OF THE NEW RAVE 15 OFF CRENSHAW AVENUE IN LOS ANGELES
The middle-aged woman carrying the
large tub of popcorn through the lobby
of the Rave Cinemas Baldwin Hills Crenshaw
Plaza 15 looks a little lost. When a
manager approaches to offer assistance, the
woman wants to know which auditorium is
showing Tower Heist. The manager sends her
off in the right direction, though she only
takes a few steps before turning back to ask,
“That’s the Xtreme one right? I got the ticket
for the Xtreme theater.” After nodding in
confirmation the manager turns his attention
to the box office where no fewer than
a dozen patrons always seem to be waiting
in line.
The multiplex at the Baldwin Hills
Crenshaw Plaza hasn’t seen this kind of
foot traffic in years. Former-basketball star
Earvin “Magic” Johnson originally opened
the the theater in 1995 at a star-studded gala
attended by the likes of Michael Jackson
and Shaquille O’Neal. Within a year, the
12-screen Magic Johnson Theatre became
one of the highest-grossing theaters in the
nation. Creating a successful entertainment
destination in South Los Angeles, an
inner-city, primarily African American community,
was a huge achievement and the
multiplex became Johnson’s flagship venue
as he opened theaters in urban areas around
the country.
In 2004, Johnson sold the multiplex to
his partner in the venture, Loews Cineplex.
Then, two years later, AMC took control
of the theater when the exhibition chain
acquired Loews. By June of last year, attendance
at the Magic Johnson Theatre in Baldwin
Hills had greatly diminished as more
modern cinemas sprung up throughout Los
Angeles. Regal opened L.A. Live in downtown
while Pacific Theatres opened upscale
multiplexes such as the Arclight in Hollywood
and The Grove in the mid-Wilshire
district. In that kind of competitive market,
AMC decided not to renew their lease, abandoning
what was once a beacon of hope in
the under-served neighborhood.
A month before AMC closed the theater,
Ken Lombard, President of Capri Urban
Investors, announced a $30 million renovation
of the mall at Baldwin Hills Crenshaw
Plaza. With AMC gone, Lombard needed
a new anchor tenant to take over the multiplex
and he found the perfect partner in
Rave Motion Pictures. The Dallas-based
circuit operates 1,000 screens in 65 theaters
across 20 states, and was looking for an opportunity
to build the Rave brand in the Los
Angeles Area.
Six months earlier, Rave started to make
their move into the Los Angeles market
when they purchased a number of multiplexes
from National Amusements, including
The Bridge, which they renamed the
Rave 18 at Howard Hughes Center.
Over the next 10 months, Rave spent
what is reported to be upwards of $10 million
to completely renovate the theater.
“The only thing they didn’t raze were the
walls,” says Jeremy Devine, vice president
of Marketing at Rave. “It was gutted down
to the floor, the ceiling and the walls. We
had to lose seats to go from flat to stadium
seating. We had to pour those risers—they
didn’t exist. At that point we definitely
20 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

TM
BRIGHTEN UP
A GLASS CEILING HELPS LIGHTEN THE LOBBY
wanted to put in new screens and had zero
interest in some type of 35mm projection
system. We’re a circuit that’s primarily
known for digital, so all that equipment
was clearly going to come out so we could
put in our digital projectors. Anything in
terms of furniture, fixtures and equipment,
anything in terms of technology is all new.”
The plaza in front of the theater was also
completely redone, and the front facade
of the building was given a makeover to
have more of a Rave appearance. The oval
concession stand that once dominated the
lobby was jettisoned, creating a huge two
story atrium with long site lines meant to
draw in moviegoer’s attention. Three stories
overhead, a skylight runs the length of the
lobby, allowing natural light to pour in during
the day.
The facelift for Baldwin Hills Crenshaw
Plaza 15 wasn’t just about new paint and
fresh carpeting. According to Devine, the
company’s main goal was to enhance the
viewer experience by providing each auditorium
amenities such as digital projection,
enhanced sound systems, rocker seats
with four feet of legroom and stadium
seating for unobstructed views. Seven of
the multiplex’s screens are 3D-equipped,
but what gets Devine really excited is
Cutting Operating Costs, Not Quality
Perlux ® Digital
Greener, Smarter – A Brighter Choice
For more information visit:
www.harkness-screens.com
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 21

NEW BUILDS >
FLATSCREEN AND FABULOUS
THE NEW SLEEK LOOK OF THE CONCESSION AREA
talking about RaveXtreme, the circuit’s
private-label big screen experience.
Rave first introduced the concept with
the re-opening of the Baldwin Hills theater
over the July 4th weekend. The big screens
have proven so popular that the company
has opened Xtreme screens in for additional
theaters in Ohio, Texas and Virginia.
“Now, screen size is all relative because all
our screens are pretty much wall-to-wall,”
explains Devine. “What we’ve done with
RaveXtreme is taken many of our larger
auditoriums that would have had a 40 to
50 foot wide screen and we’ve gone with
Xtreme, going floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall
and achieved levels of 60 or 65 feet. So it’s
not only a larger screen, it’s a curved one,
and seating is redone so that everything is a
good site line. Then we have added a sound
system that has an amazing dynamic range.”
Rave reports that patrons almost always
opt for Xtreme showings over showings of
the same film on traditional screens. The
concept is responsible, in part, for attracting
an average of 13,000 moviegoers per week to
the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza just four
months after re-opening. Offering discounted
tickets on Wednesdays and competing on
price the remainder of the week hasn’t hurt
in attracting customers either. The increased
attendance has raised sales-per-person at the
concession stand to $3.60.
“What’s interesting about this theater
is it’s almost a neighborhood theater, but
that neighborhood has really expanded,”
says Devine of South Los Angeles and the
Crenshaw district. “Baldwin Hills has wildly
different economics to it from the very
wealthy to the absolutely poverty-stricken. I
think that’s a strength of the theater because
it gives a real identity to the African American
community and the growing Latino
community as a gathering place within the
inner city.”
When Devine was thinking up ways to
get the word out about the re-opening of the
Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza 15, he contacted
the newsrooms at local media outlets
to notify them of the job fair Rave was holding
to find employees for the renovated theater.
Several television news teams turned
up to report on the event, as did 750 local
residents looking for work, of which Rave
was able to hire 100.
“At this point I think we have the interest
and the buy-in of this community,” says
Devine. “Now, it’s still a community in the
L.A. sense which means it’s a pretty big,
pretty populated area. But when people
experience the theater, they realize that
this theater could be in Bel Air. It could be
in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. I think that’s
significant because sometimes people are
skeptical, sometimes people wonder what
the commitment is, and we’ve proven the
commitment is there.”
OUTSIDE THE
BOX
The argument for building
boothless cinemas
by J. Sperling Reich
Recently, as I was taking a tour of a new
theater, the manager highlighted all
the usual amenities one might find in most
modern theaters: the brightly lit lobby, the
well-stocked concession stand, the digital
signage, the comfortable rocker seats, and
the two gigantic silver screens. As the manager
concluded the tour to return to his regular
duties, he seemed surprised by a request
to view the projection booth.
But he willingly obliged, guiding his
visitor up a short staircase into a darkened
hallway illuminated only by the the blinking
lights of digital cinema projectors,
servers and amplifiers. How often did the
manager actually come up to the booth?
“Not very,” he answered while moving his
hand along a wall in search of a light switch.
He went on to explain there was no need
to visit the booth since Cinedigm’s theater
management system auto-started all the
shows based on the schedule imported from
the theater’s point of sale system. A projectionist
visits once every week to ingest any
new content that’s arrived into the library
management server. Who would have ever
thought the projection booth would become
an afterthought for a cinema manager?
This comes as no surprise to Larry Jacobson,
a principal partner of CineGenesis,
a company specializing in digital technology
implementation within cinemas and
multiplex design. Thanks to the adoption of
digital cinema, Jacobson has been lobbying
theater owners for some time now to get rid
of their projection booths altogether. This
type of radical architectural scheme has
been dubbed “boothless cinema.”
Most theater owners would assume that
a boothless cinema simply doesn’t have a
booth at all. That’s not totally inaccurate,
but it doesn’t really define or take advantage
of the concept as Jacobson envisions it. His
non-mezzanine design has no second level
at all. “What you end up with is auditoriums
that are independent,” he explains.
“They are not tied together the way they are
in a film world where the auditoriums are
always lined up like ducks in a row because
22 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

TM
you have to have the booth above that ties
them all together. In a true digital environment
they don’t have to be lined up and can
even be perpendicular to each other.”
“People are referring to the non-mezzanine
concept as boothless cinema, so the
perception is if I take my film theater and
cut the mezzanine off than that’s boothless,”
says Jacobson. “That is an accurate
statement, but to say that you are designing
a digital cinema and it’s boothless, that is
incorrect. It is probably one of the most misunderstood
concepts and one that is taken
incorrectly for granted more than anything
I’ve ever seen out there.”
In traditional cinema design, a lobby
draws people into the multiplex before
sending half of them down a corridor to
the right and the other half down a corridor
to the left. Ultimately patrons are
brought back out through the lobby. One
of the many attributes of a true boothless
cinema is a much larger lobby, allowing for
more space that can be used for additional
revenue streams. In a project Jacobson completed
in Rocklin, California, the lobby went
from 5,000 square feet with a traditional
multiplex layout to 12,000 square feet with
a boothless design, all without losing a single
seat. “Today we’re looking at all sorts of
food services and additional businesses and
this allows you the flexibility to introduce
those other businesses and truly integrate
them into the operation,” says Jacobson. “In
the past, you always had a big multiplex and
it was surrounded by restaurants or theme
park environment or something. For the
first time ever you can actually integrate
those businesses into the complex, where
you can actually have an entertainment
center and that’s just something we could
never do before.”
Jacobson first started dreaming up the
boothless cinema idea about 15 years ago
while working as the Senior Vice President
of Design, Development and Facilities for
AMC. The circuit was undergoing a rapid
expansion and with every new theater design
he worked, he would ask the architects
what would happen if the mezzanine were
removed. What type of flexibility would it
allow him?
Unfortunately, technology was standing
in Jacobson’s way, along with stagnant
corporate policy. “The arguments were that
the projectors will never get that small,” he
recalls. “You’ll never get enough light on a
large screen out of a projector to where the
projector is small enough to put into a theater
auditorium. Now it’s amazing, the systems
today, the illumination levels are just
pristine. For people like me who worked on
illumination systems for all these years, it’s
just mind boggling. You look at the images
and see those nice bright sharp corners—we
never saw that in the film world.”
Jacobson also correctly predicted projector
sizes would decrease over time. They are
small enough now to be raised above the
audience in auditorium. Jacobson built The
Safety Lift to do just that. The lift, kind of
a small elevator that can hold up to 1,200
pounds, houses a digital cinema projector
in an environmentally controlled enclosure
that accounts for all of the cabling and exhaust.
The lift can be raised or lowered at
the touch of a button in under a minute.
Jacobson’s three criteria when designing
the lift system were safety, theater capacity
and quick swap-out. It had to have all the
safety mechanisms of a commercial elevator,
it couldn’t take up any seats and a malfunctioning
projector had to be changed in
20 minutes or less. He was also able to make
A 3D Picture That Wows
Spectral TM 240 3D
The Worldʼs Most Trusted 3D Screen
For more information visit:
www.harkness-screens.com
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 23

new builds >
sure that the projector
could be lowered without
removing or damaging
the cabling and could be
raised again with pinpoint
registration. Any minor adjustments,
such as focus or alignment,
can be done from the Remote Theatre
Manager, a handheld remote
control device Jacobson developed
in partnership with USL.
The boothless cinema concept isn’t
just theory anymore. Jacobson was
able to put his idea and his tools into
practice last year when he helped Santa Rosa
Entertainment Group remodel a former
Mervyn’s department store into a 16-screen
state-of-the-art multiplex in Rocklin.
Working with Hoefer Wysocki Architects
(HWA), an architecture firm in Kansas City,
Jacobson designed a complex without any
corridors or booths. Instead, auditoriums are
clustered around the large circular lobby in
groups of four with screen placement making
the best use of of available space.
Santa Rosa President and CEO, Dan Tocchini
reports that, despite being a brand
new design concept, they haven’t faced any
A GOOD TOOL FOR THE JOB
The boothless design has had success
with the Barco DP2K-20C
unusual issues. “It actually came out exactly
the way it was supposed to come out,” he
says. “We were very aware that being the
first of its kind, we would run into some difficulties,
but really we didn’t.”
Each of the 16 screens is equipped with a
Barco projector which connected by CAT-5
cable to a rack of servers located in a room
behind the concession stand. “It looks like
the USS Nautilus back there,” laughs Tocchini
of the room which also houses all
the audio processors and amplifiers for the
complex.
Tocchini is so pleased with his new
boothless theater that he’s looking
for other locations to open additional
multiplexes. “The theater
has done fantastic since we
opened it,” he states. “It’s run
absolutely perfectly, everything
we’ve done in there. You’d
never know it was a Mervyn’s
store unless you’d been in there
before.”
Jacobson also looks forward
to repeating the success, but his
biggest hurdle is an industry which
is averse to change. “There’s a perception
that you still have to have a corridor
that goes down to multiple auditoriums,”
Jacobson laments. “I run into it several times
a day. I’ve just done this for so long I can’t
imagine doing one with a mezzanine today.
It just makes no sense at all. I don’t understand
any of the logic.”
“There is so much flexibility that it allows
you to assign objectives and back into
them,” Jacobson adds. “In the past you could
just never do that. You had the boxes and
you lined all the boxes up. Today, you could
put auditoriums in high-rises.”
24 Boxoffice pro december 2011

Ioan Allen
This year’s topics will include:
Digital Cinema Solutions
• Things You Need To Know When Converting From Film to Digital Projection
• Digital Projection Luminance Levels
• Manage Lamp Performance for Optimized Digital Cinema Presentation
• High Frame Rates for Digital Cinema
• Server Technology for Higher Frame Rates
ICTA Experts Speak Out — Panel Discussion
New Technology — Presentations from ICTA Manufacturers
ICTA technical seminars provide an unequalled opportunity for learning
and networking with leaders in technology.
Committed to Excellence in Cinema Presentation.
Join today to enjoy the benefits of membership:
• Be associated with top equipment and service companies
• Booth discounts at all major industry trade shows
• Opportunity to attend the annual ICTA business retreat
• Increased visibility and credibility for your company
Barry Ferrell
Joe DeMeo
Visit us online for a list of our 180 members
www.ICTAweb.com

SHERLOCK
HOLMES: A
GAME OF
SHADOWS
THE BIG PICTURE
26

DRIVE ON, OLD CHAP
JUDE LAW AND ROBERT DOWNEY JR. HAVE
RETURNED FOR THE SEQUEL
MENTAL
WARFARE
In Sherlock Holmes: A Game
of Shadows, the master sleuth
has met his match
by Amy Nicholson
In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had a conundrum:
his Sherlock Holmes series had
made him rich, but he was restless to begin
writing novels he considered more highbrow. So
he decided to kill his his creation. The weapon:
the evil genius Moriarty, a villain with Sherlock’s
superhuman brain and a heart full of murder.
In the short story The Final Problem, Watson
races up a mountain only to realize Moriarty and
Sherlock have wrestled each other off a waterfall
and fallen to their death. Fans were aghast.
Doyle was pleased. In a letter to his mother, he
wrote, “I must save my mind for better things,
even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with
him.” Alas for Doyle, all good ends force a new
beginning—public outrage demanded that he
resurrect Sherlock Holmes eight years later with
The Hound of the Baskervilles. So why, then, is
Warner Bros’ Sherlock sequel and potential mass
franchise reaching to The Final Problem for inspiration?
Because why battle a deadly dog when
you can pit Sherlock Holmes against his greatest
arch-nemesis for a super-cinematic showdown of
the two smartest men in London?
TURN PAGE TO READ OUR EXCLUSIVE
INTERVIEWS WITH STARS NOOMI RAPACE
AND JARED HARRIS AND PRODUCER
SUSAN DOWNEY
27

BIG PICTURE > SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS
THE GAME IS AFOOT
RAPACE’S GYPSY FIGHTER IS FLANKED BY WATSON AND SHERLOCK
THE GIRL WHO
CONQUERED
HOLLYWOOD
Noomi Rapace’s
stunning rise to fame
Two years ago, Noomi Rapace
played the most intense role of
any actress’ career: Lisbeth Salander
of The Girl With a Dragon
Tattoo, a tattooed fighter who
had to be strong to survive Stieg
Larsson’s brutal Swedish trilogy.
Rapace was so committed to the
role, she even got facial piercing—and
her bravery paid off.
Overnight, she was the new face
in Hollywood and before the then
Swedish speaking-only actress
could say “fantastisk,” she was
the darling of Guy Ritchie and
Ridley Scott, both of whom cast
her as the lead in their next big
blockbusters. Is Hollywood ready
for its next tough heroine?
Jude Law said he thinks you could take
him in a fight.
Oh, no, I don’t think so. But I love that he
would say that. It really surprised me how
everybody embraced me, just kind of took
me into their little group of, because, you
know, it’s always different to come in with
the second movie when everybody else have
worked together before and they were really
tight and very like a small family in a way—
and it was just incredible how Robert and
Susan, his wife and Jude took me into their
family and I became kind of one of their
boys and we had so much fun. But I’m pretty
sure I won’t take him in a fight. But I like
fighting and I train a lot. I train in martial
arts and stuff. I wouldn’t fight him. I don’t
think so.
I can’t even imagine what the last two
years have been like for you: to have
such a strong career in Sweden, but then
explode and all of a sudden have all of a
sudden these high-profile films?
Sometimes it’s a bit unreal because everything
happened so fast. I was in LA in
August a year ago, and I met Ridley [Scott,
director of Rapace’s next film Prometheus]
and I met Robert Downey, and I met a bunch
I N T E R V I E W
of people, and then like a couple of weeks
later, I went to London and then met Guy
Ritchie and we shot Sherlock, a couple of
weeks later. So everything happened really
fast. And then when I was shooting Sherlock,
Ridley said to me that he wants me to play
the lead for the prequel to Alien and he’s one
of my heroes since I was, I dunno, as long I
can remember. But when you work, you’re
so much in it, and you’re so focused, it’s so
intense, it’s such hard work. So when you
actually have some time off, when you stop
to realize how fantastic it is, and how amazing
it is that those people want to work with
me, it’s been really, really intense and really
fantastic—and yeah, I’m still a bit surprised.
What I’m loving about your career is
you’re not only getting cast by directors
who want to show strong women, but
you’re showing different types of strong
women. Like, here, you’re playing a
woman who can fight and hold her own,
but doesn’t even have to have tattoos or a
boyish body to seem tough.
Exactly. What I love, what I’m always looking
for when I’m reading a script is I want to
fall in love with the character. I want to feel
like this is someone I want to explore, this
is someone I want to give soul and life to.
28 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

BIG PICTURE > SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS > NOOMI RAPACE
Because I know that I can never do anything
kind of half way, I always give everything,
100 percent. And I know that I need to put
my whole life in it so everything I do, I
need to really choose carefully and I need
to know that I want to let this person move
in for a couple of months. Or sometimes six
months, sometimes it’s a year. Sometimes
you read a script and the girl is just kind of
something sweet and sexy and charming
and that’s like, “Okay, but what should I
do? Why should I spend a lot of time doing
that?” So I think I always look for personalities.
I don’t think I ever think about my
choices or my career in a cynical way. It’s
not like, “Okay, now I need to show everyone
I can do funny or that I can do sexy or
that I can be really beautiful, whatever it
is.” It’s much more emotional for me. And I
kind of like those strong women. It doesn’t
matter if they’re really feminine and very
much a woman or very masculine and like a
tomboy. For example, like Ridley, the character
I’m doing in Prometheus, she’s an archaeologist,
a scientist and very sophisticated.
She’s feminine and a boss but she changes
into more of a warrior in the middle of the
movie. So she goes through a big transformation.
So I think every character I’ve done
is different from the others. What they have
in common is they all fight for one thing.
Here, you play a gypsy. I heard you
wanted to visit Transylvania to learn
more about the Roma people before you
started shooting this film. And that actually
your father was Roma himself?
I always want to prep really good before I
start to shoot the movie. But on Sherlock,
everything happened so fast, so I was like, “I
want to do this! I want to do that!” And then
everybody’s like, “You know, we’re going
to shoot next week. We’re actually starting
Monday.” I was like, “Oh my god,” so I was
kind of prepping to find a nice weekend
when we were off, but I never had time to
go. We were looking into it. Doing the whole
shoot, I was like, “Maybe I can have my Fridays
off and go to Transylvania?” and they
were like, “Maybe you can go to France.” I
was like, “I don’t want to go to France!” So it
was hard. I never managed to go. And I would
love to one day at some point because the
gypsies, the lifestyle and the culture, I think
it’s really inspiring, really different from all
other countries. To be like a world citizen
and able to move around and not commit to
a specific country, a specific government. I
kind of like that idea. And also they’re a very
proud people. But still, they have a really
tough situation because they’re not welcome
and it’s quite common that people blame the
gypsies. They have a really bad education. So
it’s very complex situation and life for gypsies
today, it’s difficult and tricky and I would
love to learn more. I did learn a bit when I
was working with this woman, Bita, who
came to London and taught me some Romani,
their language, and a couple of dances,
a couple of songs. But my father, he was Spanish,
he was a Spanish flamenco singer. And
he said to me just before he died—I didn’t
grow up with him—I got to know him when
I was 25, 22. And he died a few years ago and
he said to me when he was dying that his
mother was gypsy. But nobody else knew
anything about that. So he said something to
me that nobody ever knew or talked about. I
think his life was quite complicated in Spain
before he left. So I guess I will say that I will
never know what happened, what his mom
was like. She died when he was three. So it’s
quite hidden and a mystery, that side of me.
My father and my Spanish, gypsy side.
Sounds like a romantic story.
Yeah, yeah. I think so. He ran away when
he was 16 with a girl that was gypsy. And
I know that they were running. He said to
me that he was just half-blood gypsy and
then her family didn’t accept him. So yeah, I
think he’s quite romantic—there’s a whole
movie there.
Your character here is a fortune teller.
Have you ever had your fortune read?
No, actually I haven’t. I’m really respectful
to it, but I don’t want to know. I have it
inside me. I know what I need to know and
I know when I’m off-track—I know when I
lose my road. I think I would believe it too
much. I think I would take it too serious if
someone said something to me about the
future. It’s almost like reading critics or
reviews—I don’t read anything about me.
It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad or whatever.
Because I know that it will kind of stay
in me, the words will stay in me. So I try to
keep away from that.
I can only imagine if five years ago a fortune
teller told you that you’d be working
with your idol, Ridley Scott.
I would say “Yeah, really. Come on. Don’t
give me that.”
Your character here, Sim, correct me if
I’m wrong, but I think she’s the only
major figure in the film who wasn’t actually
an Arthur Conan Doyle character.
She’s created wholly new for the series.
I think that Guy Ritchie has a very strong
thing with gypsies. Like his movie Snatch
with Brad Pitt. And we talked about gypsies
and their cultures. I don’t know if it came
from him, but I know that he has a very
strong—I don’t know if I should say love—
but I think he respects them and finds them
interesting. For me, it was really inspiring
in the film, like some kind of destiny thing,
when this role came to me. And also I met
Robert for only 20 minutes in LA, but I felt
from the first moment that I had some kind
of connection with him, that I wanted to
work with him. And we talked about movies
and dreams and what kind of movies we
want to make and how we want to work.
And we didn’t talk about Sherlock at all, so it
was interesting when they called my team
up later on, because I didn’t know that they
were thinking about Sherlock Holmes. It
sounds like it was meant to be in a way.
Is Sherlock as large of a character in
Sweden?
Oh, he’s really big. He’s big. I think he’s big
in all of Europe. Everybody’s heard about
him. I’m not sure that we actually read the
books and know the stories about him. But
everybody knows who he is, definitely.
It looks like from the poster here that
your special skill is going to be throwing
knives.
Yes. I’m quite good at that. [Laughs] I was
practicing. It’s really fun. It’s really hard.
Difficult, though. I was practicing with the
stunt guy and also just managing to move in
the corset and the, you know, in my clothes
because it’s really uncomfortable to have
to to roll around and jump and throw your
stuff and all those physical action scenes. I
was so jealous because Robert and Jude had
those boots and they could just run and it
was so easy for them, and I was like, “Ugh! I
hate this skirt! The corset, I can’t move, it’s
hurting me, it’s hurting my ribs!” It would
give me a strong feeling of I could totally
30 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

imagine how I walk for women at the time to be trapped in those
white teethbone corsets.
It’s like that Ginger Rogers quote, where she does everything
Fred Astaire does except backwards and in heels.
Yes, it’s true. It was quite fun because it was very easy and playful
and we were kind of searching through the whole journey and I
think the fight scenes kind of came to us. It was not fully decided
how it was going to be. So with Robert and Jude, we were working
together to find solutions, and what was credible and possible for
our characters to do. To not make her be like an action hero that can
do anything and everything. If you’re a woman, you’re smaller, and
if you’re fighting with a big man and they’re much stronger—maybe
you’re faster but they’re stronger—and if they hit you in the face, if
they punch you, you’ll probably go down. So I tried to find a balance
between her being able to tke care of herself and to protect herself,
but I didn’t want her to be too much of a graphic novel gypsy icon,
you know, sticker. I want her to be human.
You know your character Lisbeth so well from the Dragon Tattoo
series. When the new one comes out, is it going to be almost an
interesting intellectual exercise to look at the different choices
that the director and the actress made in the new one?
Um … I haven’t even thought about it. I really respect David Fincher. I
think he’s incredible and I really like his previous movies. So I think
he will probably do something that is personal for him and a little
different from what we did. I don’t feel like Lisbeth is mine. I gave her
my soul and my life for one-and-a-half years. I did everything I could
and then when I finished, I left her. So it feels like I was really done
with her. I knew I never wanted to go back and I knew I never wanted
to step into her shoes again. I think it’s really interesting to see what
they do and how they give life to the story. But I don’t know if it’s
gonna be from an acting perspective—it’s more going to be the whole
story. I always like when you forget about the performance, when you
don’t think about, “Oh, this is an actress who plays that character.” So I
hope that I can see the movie and see the characters but kind of forget
about the back story and kind of forget everything about this.
Going forward, how do you want to balance your Swedish
career with your English career? Is it important to you to continue
to do films in your native language?
Yeah. I think it’s important to keep the connection with that side in
you. Because it’s like, I didn’t speak English three years ago, so for
me this language is new. I’m kind of getting into it more and more
and I realized when I was filming Prometheus I was dreaming in
English, I was texting my mom in English. It’s quite weird to realize
that I was switching from Swedish to English. It became almost like
my first language. But still it’s like, I grew up speaking Swedish and
Icelandic. And I think that for all actors, for example, when I saw
Biutiful, with Javier Bardem, a year ago, it’s so strong and so powerful
to see him go back and do something in Spanish again. I want to go
back and do a movie in Scandinavia. You can do Danish or Norwegian
or Swedish movie. A lot of interesting films are coming from
there, so definitely. But in the near future, it looks like I’m going to
do more English movies.
THE FACE OF EVIL
Only Jared Harris’ Moriarty
can give Sherlock a scare
Jared Harris is a charmer, not that you’d know
that by watching any of his films. The red-headed
actor with the startlingly intense eyes was
raised in the business: his father, Richard Harris,
was King Arthur in Camelot and his mother,
a Welsh beauty, would go on to marry Rex
Harrison. Jared has played a jail’s worth of villains
and a classroom’s worth of brainiacs—the
right preparation to tackle the role of Sherlock
Holmes’ smartest opponent, Moriarty. With his
entrance, Holmes is in real peril—and audiences
can’t wait to see Harris go mind-to-mind with
the genius detective.
I N T E R V I E W
I’ve read that Arthur Conan Doyle invented Moriarty just to
find a way to kill off Sherlock Holmes because he was sick
of writing the stories. He wanted to make the ultimate villain.
Well, it was not the only reason. I mean, that wasn’t the reason
why he invented Moriarty. The reason that Conan Doyle invents
Moriarty is that he has a super sleuth who can solve any
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 31

BIG PICTURE > SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS > JARED HARRIS
the second they take their
clothes off, you lose interest.
As soon as you know
what the villain is up to,
your interest in that character
starts to dwindle. So the
longer you can put off the
moment of revelation about
what the person is up to,
you maintain that tension
with the audience.
Is Moriarty like the Joker,
just this source of anarchy?
YOUR MOVE
HARRIS ON THE SET WITH DIRECTOR GUY RITCHIE AND ROBERT DOWNEY JR.
problem. So it’s a bit like Superman, you
know? There’s no real opposition to Superman
so you have to invent kryptonite. So
I guess Moriarty is like Sherlock Holmes’
kryptonite. He invents this character who’s
as smart, as sharp, as intelligent, as devious
and as manipulative, but lacks whatever
moral restraints that Sherlock Holmes has
so that he’s a very very dangerous opponent.
That was the idea behind creating him. And
then, he only appears in two stories himself.
The rest of the time, he’s talked about. But
certainly in The Final Problem, at that point,
Conan Doyle was fed up with writing Sherlock
Holmes stories and wanted to finish it
so then he did the natural thing and brought
the two forces together. But then not long
after that, I think there was such an outcry
for more Sherlock Holmes and I’m sure they
wafted great big fat sterling notes under his
nose and he changed his mind and brought
him back.
That’s pretty hard to resist, those big fat
sterling notes.
Well, they were huge back then as well,
those old five-pound notes. They were great
big white things that were like small letters.
They were quite significant back then.
It seems like it’d be hard to pickpocket
money back then if money was so big.
You’d hear amazing things about what they
could get up to back then, but yeah, they
probably just whacked you over the head
and picked your wallet.
So if you’re playing the one guy who
might be even smarter than Sherlock
Holmes, is your type of intelligence different
than the way Downey plays his
intelligence?
Obviously, otherwise I’d just end up being
a bad version of Robert, which, you know,
I can’t copy what he does—he’s unique,
you know. That’s something that we talked
about a lot. Within a limited amount of
screen time, how do you convey the idea?
Sherlock Holmes goes a long way towards
creating the impression you’re trying to
create for you, which is great, because of
the respect he gives the character and the
way he talks about him—and generally,
anything that Sherlock Holmes says, one
takes as being gospel. And then, for me I
think the character, he’s like a grandmaster
chess player—they’re always thinking 12
or 14 moves ahead. You always want to
have a sense that there’s more to the plan
to be unfolded. And then the other thing
you always see in movies with bad guys is
that they all say too much. They all give
everything away. And so I didn’t want to say
anything unless I absolutely had to. What
happens in these things is that the bad guy
becomes a vehicle for the plot. So every time
he opens his mouth, exposition falls out like
a sewer. With villains is that it’s a little bit
like watching a stripper—no offense—but
That character I think was
trying to prove a point
about human nature with
the Batman. In this, Moriarty’s
manipulating what he
understands about human
nature, but he’s got his own purpose. He
isn’t trying to prove some sort of existential
point. In fact, my impression was that by
and large, until Sherlock Holmes dropped
into his storyline, he’s largely not concerned
with him. He’s pursuing this agenda that’s
irrespective of what Sherlock Holmes was
up to and then eventually, he can’t ignore it
any longer. But he isn’t out from the beginning
to make some point to him, which is
my impression of the Joker.
Do you get to use his amazing air rifle?
Ah! I just don’t know how much one can
give away! That element is in the story, but I
can’t say who employs it.
Are you worried about annoying the
purists?
It sounds odd, because I’m sure the Sherlock
Holmes purists will just throw eggs in my
face for even saying this, but they really are
sincere about remaining true to the spirit
of Conan Doyle’s work. And whenever they
can and could mine from the combined
works that was going to be useful in the
story, they did. So, I mean even some of the
lines of dialogue pop up. But you know, I
think what happens in Sherlock Holmes
is that there was a tradition that sprung
up from the time when it first started to
be represented on film, which mirrors the
Victorian ideal about the time period: this
sort of genteel, well dressed, well appointed
32 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

BIG PICTURE > SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS
period that these people lived in, which has
come down from Basil Rathbone and Jeremy
Brett and everything about the BBC version.
But I think if they actually went back to Victorian
England—I mean, certainly the way
that Charles Dickens wrote about it—it was
an absolute slum. Some of the people were
living well-off, but most of the people were
living in these f--king hell holes. And I imagine
that it’s a lot closer to Guy Ritchie’s version
in terms of the environment that these
people were in. And I think with Robert
Downey Jr’s Sherlock, he’s taken the darker
elements of Sherlock Holmes, which are absolutely
there in Conan Doyle’s writing, and
he’s brought those up to the forefront rather
than sweeping them under the carpet.
I was wondering: You’ve played a lot of
villains, and you’ve played a lot of doctors.
Is there any connection between
doctors and villains.
When one has had one’s healthcare benefits
disapproved, I suppose yes. You’re villainbound.
I was useless in science, so it can’t be
anything innate. Probably it’s the fact that
I’m, generally speaking, because of Mad Men
cleanly shaved and my hair’s all neat and tidy,
so I’ve got that kind of professional look.
Does that mean you couldn’t play a hippie
if you wanted to?
You’d have to make a wig, so it depends on
whether they want to spend that money on
you or not.
So, there’s the other Moriarty right now,
which is Andrew Scott on the BBC. Have
you avoided watching his version?
I saw it last year, but I haven’t talked to
him. I mean, it’s so different in terms of the
things we were required to do, because it’s
updated. The whole way of behaving is modern
and casual—he was a sort of slinky villain,
you know? But I enjoyed it. I thought
Benedict [Cumberbach, who plays Sherlock]
was a fantastic actor. I thought they did a
good job with it. It’s got all those things
about Sherlock Holmes that you like. But I
really didn’t see that many of them. I think
I saw one on the plane going over before I
started the job.
And before you even started the job, the
first Sherlock movie from 2009 had the
voice of Moriarty at the end. Obviously,
that wasn’t you, but was there any temptation
to continue to sound like him?
No. There was all that crazy stuff about that
voice being Brad Pitt or something, which
I’m sure came about because Guy and Brad
have worked together in Snatch. But it
wasn’t, not at all. I will not say who it was,
but I know who it was. That would just get
me into big trouble.
Is it possible that Moriarty is misunderstood?
Oh God, no. [Laughs] Again one of the things
that they did not do, which is provide some
bulls--t explanation as to why this person
did what he did—he was abused as a child
or some bulls--t like that. I’m with William
Golding [author of Lord of the Flies] on that
one. He said that the more you explain a
character, the more you diminish him, and I
agree. The lesser you know, the better. It was
the same mistake with Hannibal Lector. As
soon as you found out that he’d been imprisoned
as a child in World War II and forced to
eat his sister, all the mystery went out of the
character.
Did you have a favorite set piece?
I don’t have a favorite set piece necessarily,
but one of the things that is fantastic about
doing that film and doing movies in general
on that scale is that you get to go to places
where you would normally as a tourist only
get to see in passing. We went to these amazing
estates around, outside of London, National
Trust castles and then you get given a
little tour. They take you around and show
you all these places, the history there—it’s
stunning. That part is one of the great perks
of this job. We went to the palace that Elizabeth
I, before she was queen, she maintained
her residence and they pointed out the tree
that she was in sitting in when they told
her her sister had died and she was going to
be queen of England. It’s just fantastic to be
able to walk around and see all that stuff.
Wow, it’s very convenient for her to be
sitting somewhere outside and pretty instead
of just in one of the boring rooms.
So it could rather have been made up, you
think? That’s what you’re saying? You’re
casting aspersions on it?
I’m just saying, if I was queen, I’d always
hang out and be seen in scenic
places—
In a tree? Waiting just to be told.
You might as well have your legacy be as
romantic as possible.
I would’ve been sitting outside as much as
possible, too, because then you’d see the
people with swords come after you and you
could run in the other direction. They’d try
to chop each other’s heads off all the time
back then. Sitting in a little room makes you
very easy to trap.
Exactly.
It was very dangerous job being related to
royalty back then. It was a short life expectancy.
It’s true. You shouldn’t even marry into
it. You’d just get your head cut off in a
second.
Back then. It’s a bit different. It’s not quite
what it used to be. Most of them are broke.
You have to support them.
So now that you’re about to play a villain
in a very big movie, does that mean that
you can walk down the street and scare
children?
I don’t have the beard, so I’ll probably go unrecognized,
which is what I like. I like being
able to walk around in disguise as myself.
I don’t know. I remember watching John
Lithgow on a talk show after a movie called
Ricochet, I think, had come out. He played a
really crazy nutball psychopath villain and
he’s just going to visit some friends in their
apartment building and he calls the lift, and
the lift door opens, and the woman sort of
looks up and is about to step out, and sees
John and makes eye contact with him, and
he smiles at her and she screams in terror
and presses the ‘close’ button and tries to get
away from him. I haven’t had that experience
yet, but I’ll let you know when I do.
You should. That’s raw power.
That means you’ve done your job. I won’t
need a Halloween costume. I’ll just go as
myself and scare people.
34 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

BIG PICTURE > SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS
DESPERATELY
SEEKING
SUSAN
Behind one lucky actor
is the woman who’s
also his producer
Susan Downey is one of the most
recognizable female producers in
Hollywood, and not just because
she shares a last name with her
husband, Robert Downey Jr. The
Illinois valedictorian moved to Los
Angeles to be a producer and
had her first big theatrical credit
on the maritime horror Ghost
Ship before she was 29. Working
for Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis’
Dark Castle Entertainment,
Downey was quickly promoted
through the hierarchy and on
her third film with the company—Gothika,
starring recent
Oscar-winner Halle Berry—she
was romanced by co-star Robert
Downey Jr., who quickly proposed
and then publicly credited
her for turning his life—and his
career—around. While working
on Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, she
heard the director was shopping
around a Sherlock Holmes reboot
and got her husband a meeting
to discuss the lead role. The rest
was elementary. Or was it? Susan
Downey gives us the scoop.
Did anything surprise you about the reaction
to the first film?
It wasn’t as much surprising as it was a nice
relief. I know a lot of people were wondering
how we were going to make this and
be true to the source material—to not piss
anyone off—but at the same time justify
making a big holiday movie.
Sherlock Holmes has been widely popular
ever since Arthur Conan Doyle started
the series, but in every incarnation,
he’s different—like he’s adapting to the
different audiences of the time.
The thing with Sherlock is since its incarnation,
it’s always been serialized. There were
multiple stories, multiple movies, the TV
show. And each audience was expecting
something different based on what they
were able to achieve at the time. What we
decided to do was go back to the original
stories and take the essence of the character,
the dynamic between Holmes and Watson,
and then also take the things that Conan
Doyle didn’t necessarily put on the page, but
were things he imagined these men to be.
With today and our incredible use of special
effects and stunts, we were able to bring it
to another level while still staying true to
Conan Doyle’s vision of these guys. We felt
it had to be smart and have a great mystery
at its core, but at the same time we wanted
to make sure it wasn’t stuffy and in one
room and all just talk. I don’t think the wide
audience we were looking for would have
embraced it that way.
Is that how you came up with Sherlock
Vision?
Originally, Lionel Wigram, who was one of
the original producers, brought the project
to Warner Bros. when he was an executive
and they didn’t quite see it—they still had
the old-fashioned vision in their heads. But
when he became a producer, he brought it
to a different exec, Dan Lin, and he’d spent a
bit of money and done a graphic novel as a
mock-up. It showed a bit more of the actionadventure
hero that Lionel always imagined
him to be when he was reading the stories as
a kid. From that, it evolved. And when Guy
came onboard, we really wanted to find the
marriage between Holmes the intellectual
I N T E R V I E W
hero and Holmes the action guy. And this
Holmes-a-vision, or Holmes-pre-viz—we
called it a couple different things—that we
felt was the perfect marriage to show how
he’s always one step ahead, yet can be a man
of action and was a highly skilled martial
artist. Which was something Conan Doyle
created, it wasn’t something we made up.
With these stories being serialized, how
did that shape the way you approached
your films, like say holding back Moriarty
in the first film and now having
him in the sequel?
It’s interesting, because you don’t want to
get too ahead of yourself. We didn’t have a
bigger plan from the get-go of how we were
going to lay out the stories, but we did, I
have to admit, have it in the back of our
mind that if people embraced the first film,
we knew some of the things we then wanted
to do. In the first one, for example, we wanted
to stay in London and we wanted to just
hint at Moriarty. And we felt if we had the
opportunity to do another one, we wanted
to get Holmes on the continent and get him
to explore a bit more of Europe and Moriarty.
And if this one works, we have ideas—
not to get too far ahead of ourselves—on
what we could do to keep the characters and
the story fresh, but still deliver on the things
people have been responding to.
Tell me about casting Jared Harris as
the evil Moriarty—is it because he’s a
redhead?
It has nothing to do with that, I can assure
you. [Laughs] Moriarty is this seminal
character in literature—he’s kind of the
first super villain—and it was important
to get someone who you could completely
believe in the role. When you go through
the casting process, especially for a big studio
movie, you throw around well known
names as well as just great actors. The
concern we had with someone who was
maybe a bit more well known to the audience
is that they wouldn’t lose themselves
to the character—that the audience would
be more aware they were watching an actor
portray Moriarty. With Jared, he’s able to
completely become Moriarty, and he possesses
two qualities that were essential to
whoever was going to play the role. On the
36 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

BIG PICTURE > SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS > SUSAN DOWNEY
one hand, you believe him as a professor—
he’s intellectual, he seems harmless, he
can hide in plain sight—and then when he
needs to turn on a dime and become evil,
you believe that just as much.
It’s bold that the book you chose for
your sequel is the book Arthur Conan
Doyle thought would be his last book.
So he thought, but that didn’t work so well
with the fans. They demanded more and
he figured out how to bring Sherlock back.
People have been surprised, they’ve been
like, “Why jump to it right away?” But I
think part of it is us not being too presumptuous
about how many of these we get to
do, and also just not being able to resist the
incredible standoff between Sherlock and
Moriarty.
What would Conan Doyle think if he
could fast-forward to the future just to
see the movie?
There’s a group of people called the Baker
Street Irregulars—they’re a group of Sherlock
fans who meet up—and what we’ve
discovered is so many of the Sherlock fans
just enjoy any interpretation. Especially
if you’re not completely changing things.
And we felt like we were just bringing
things out that hadn’t been obvious before.
So I think he’d appreciate our interpretation.
And I think he’d enjoy going to the movies.
You’d think so, but he was a quirky guy, so
who knows?
Do you feel Sherlock had to have a British
director?
Did it have to? I don’t know, but it was
something that we kept in mind. I think
the fact that we have a British director is a
good thing, and once Guy came onboard,
there seemed no other way to do it. Guy
would tell us that when he was in boarding
school, when the kids were good they would
be read Sherlock over the speakers. Having
heard them, he had a vision of what they
would look like. But when he saw the various
versions over the years, they never quite
captured that energy that he imagined. He
was the guy for it.
When you’re working on a film together,
do you and Robert always agree?
He kind of leads the charge when he’s developing
his characters, and then it ends up
being a conversation between him and Guy
and Jude a lot. And then I’m around and the
other producers are around to support their
creative vision of it. He’s got a very specific
point of view, and the nice thing is that
it clicks with the way we all see it. It’s all
evolved—for the second one, we all started
with a blank page and developed it together.
We talked about what we wanted the character
arcs to be and how to make it different
than the first movie. It’s a conversation
more than an agreement or disagreement or
debate.
It takes so much work to create a film—
it’s such a long process—and then when
you finally get to sit down and watch
it, not only are you watching your own
work, but there’s your husband’s face on
the screen.
What’s interesting is that I’ve always been
able to separate the two. I don’t feel like I’m
watching Robert up there—he’s so good, I
feel like I’m watching whatever character
he’s portraying. It’s not that different from
watching Jude or Jared or Noomi—it’s just,
“Do I believe in them in the role?” and the
answer is usually yes. But making a movie
takes a lot of effort and energy—it’s exhausting
and frustrating and exhilarating. And
as you’re doing it, you don’t even know
what you have. You feel like you have a lot
of great days coming together, but until
you cut it all together and see how it flows,
you’re just hoping that it works as well as
you think it might.
Everybody talks about the lack of female
directors in Hollywood, or for good
female roles after a certain age. How
do you feel the landscape is for female
producers?
There certainly seems to be more male
producers than female producers out there,
especially doing these bigger movies. But
until I’m asked the question, I honestly
don’t think about it. To be a producer on
a movie, you have to have a lot of passion
and put in a lot of hours of hard work. And
you have to be able to bring people together
and get them to drive forward. I will be
in a room with a dozen people working on
a project, and it won’t be until I’ve left the
room that I’ll realize I was the only woman.
I never feel that there’s something that I
can’t do—or that another woman can’t do.
I don’t know why there’s seemingly more
men doing it than women, but I don’t know
the numbers. I went to film school at USC,
and when I entered in our production program,
they allowed 50 students in. There
were four women. And then in my third
year, they doubled the amount of students
they let in, so there were 100 students in
my year and at that point eight women. But
I never felt as a woman that there was some
inequality or something different going on.
Going back, I don’t know if it was just more
men were trying to get in? I’ve never felt
held back being a woman and I’ve never
seen another woman get pushed out of the
way for a guy? I encourage other women—
I think we make great producers. I think
we have a caring quality, a nurturing quality—not
that men don’t have it or can’t—
but there’s something natural in wanting
to bring something to life and make sure
everybody is getting what they need, which
is a big part of the job. I had great mentors
who were men and did it equally as well. To
me, anyone can do it if they have the right
mindset and tools.
At the Golden Globes when Robert won
for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical
for Sherlock Holmes, he started his speech
by saying he hadn’t written one because
you told him Matt Damon was going to
win for The Informant! Did you really tell
him that?
Okay, just to clarify. The thing I love about
Robert is he has this philosophy: if I’m not
rooting for myself, why should anybody
else? So he was going in thinking, “I have
as good of a shot as anyone else.” Which is
great! But me as his partner who wanted to
protect him, I’d been looking online and
lots of people were saying that they thought
Matt would get it. So that morning it came
up in conversation and I said, “Well, everybody’s
saying it’s going to be Matt.” Which
wasn’t my opinion, I was just trying to manage
the expectations so we could have a fun
evening regardless of how it went down. Of
course, he seized that opportunity to make
it sound like I didn’t believe he would win.
As you can probably understand, there’s a
slight variation on that.
38 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

The most complete
D-Cinema
Audio Solution
DCP-100 Digital Cinema
Processor
DCA Amplifiers
DCS Loudspeakers
Visit us at CineAsia
December 6-8, 2011
Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre
Booth 100
qsccinema.com
©2011 QSC Audio Products, LLC. All rights reserved. QSC and the QSC logo are registered trademarks of
QSC Audio Products, LLC in the U.S. Patent and Trademark office and other countries.

BY SARA MARIA VIZCARRONDO
ON THE HORIZON
HONEY, WE’VE BECOME HIPPIES
PAUL RUDD AND JENNIFER ANISTON IN THE COMMUNE COMEDY WANDERLUST
WANDERLUST
NOT ALL COMMUNES ARE MURDEROUS
DISTRIBUTOR Universal CAST Paul Rudd, Jennifer Aniston, Alan
Alda, Justin Theroux, Malin Akerman, Joe Lo Truglio DIREC-
TOR David Wain SCREENWRITER David Wain PRODUCERS Paul
Rudd, David Wain, Judd Apatow, Ken Marino GENRE Comedy
RATING R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language
and drug use RUNNING TIME TBD RELEASE DATE February 24,
2012
> In Wanderlust, hyper-connected Manhattan
executives Jennifer Aniston and Paul
Rudd have ambitions that outpace even
their libidos—a bummer when this movie
stars two of the hottest properties over 30.
But when Rudd is fired, he and Aniston are
forced to uproot and relocate for Rudd’s
temporary “bridge job”—data entry for
his a-hole brother in Atlanta. Before you
can say “Paula Deen,” the New Yorkers are
insulted by the family and alienated by the
south, and run screaming from his bro’s
McMansion to find themselves stranded in
a “naturalist community.” Not everyone’s
a nudist, or a free-lover, or even a vegetarian—the
group takes all kinds—but even so,
the Manhattanites plan a fast escape only to
become quickly captivated by the natives.
(They don’t call it a commune, they prefer
“intentional community.”) The comic team
behind Wanderlust gelled on the sketch comedy
show The State and since have produced
comedies like Wet Hot American Summer
and Ryan Reynolds oddity The Ten. Yet even
the massive cast of The Ten (a comic retake
on Kieslowski’s Decalog) can’t hold a candle
to the star power in Wanderlust: it’s not just
Rudd and Aniston providing the wattage—
the comic group has accrued members like
writer/actor Justin Theroux and New Girl’s
Michaela Watkins with Judd Apatow adding
his Midas touch as a producer.
CHRONICLE
SUPER HEROES WHO AREN’T SO SUPER
DISTRIBUTOR Fox CAST Dane DaHaan, Michael B Jordan, Luke
Tyler, Michael Kelly, Ashley Hinshaw DIRECTOR Josh Trank
SCREENWRITER Max Landis PRODUCERS John Davis, Adam
Schroeder GENRE Thriller RATING TBD RUNNING TIME TBD RE-
LEASE DATE February 3, 2012
> Debut director Josh Trank was discovered
working second unit on Paranormal Activity
2. Outfitting him to shoot his own found
footage film seemed like a logical next step.
Chronicle is Fox’s bid in the low-fi trend, but
this take on the subgenre tries to fill as many
niches as possible. Three high school boys
gain superpowers by stumbling onto a mysterious
energy source. Like normal kids, they
don’t immediately realize the responsibility of
their strengths or the urgency to master their
skills. They screw around like a less-alienated
version of X-Men First Class. In a “real world”
context, a superpower is as good as a parlor
trick—until you realize your powers are
dangerous and come with the responsibility
to do real things, like rescue people from
meteorites, vanquish evil overlords or outrun
the apocalypse. Well, these kids know there’s
evil in the world, but they’re busy playing. So
when a particularly dangerous (but still human)
threat appears, they have to be prodded
to help people. That moral conundrum puts
this story in the playhouse with CW shows
like Gossip Girl, where characters are figuring
out moment by moment what makes them
good or evil. While Chronicle cashes in on
the super low-budget proposition of found
footage, it’s cashing in bigger on the tween
ticketholder. It was written by Max Landis,
son of John and the pen behind the upcoming
Frankenstein, which will help this title prove it
has critical brains to back its box office brawn.
ACT OF VALOR
REEL NAVY SEALS
CAST Roselyn Sanchez, Emilio Rivera, Jason Cottle, Gonzalo
Menendez, Ailsa Marshall DIRECTORS Scott Waugh, Mike Mc-
Coy SCREENWRITER Kurt Johnstad PRODUCERS Scott Waugh,
Mike McCoy GENRE Action RATING TBD RUNNING TIME TBD
RELEASE DATE February 17, 2011
> With all the cross-promotions this action
flick has done with the Playstation hit
Battlefield 3, you’ve probably seen the name
Act of Valor and thought, “That’s a video game,
right?” It’s easy to get confused as this fully
scripted film is based on true events and stars
real Navy SEALS doing true-to-life tactical
maneuvers and using real modern warfare
technologies. (Though it’s not a documenta-
40 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

REAL AMERICAN HEROES
ACTS OF VALOR STARS ACTUAL SOLDIERS FROM THE FRONTLINES
GHOSTLY GUESTS
THE HORROR COMEDY THE INNKEEPERS
ry.) While the film’s salute to honor and duty
are just what the American doctor may have
ordered, the filmmakers are challenged to
provide the emotional heft because watching
the real thing isn’t insurance the film will feel
real. Meanwhile, the film’s cast of SEALS (all
uncredited non-actors) give this film an intimacy
by channeling their own experiences in
their scenes of domestic drama. Shot mostly
in Cambodia with some detours to Mexico,
Florida, Puerto Rico and the Ukraine, Valor
tracks the SEALS as they pursue a worldwide
terror ring. As for directors Scott Waugh and
Mike McCoy, these first-time feature helmers
were hired to direct a recruitment video for
the Naval Special Warfare Command that got
them access to the SEALS and earned them
the trust of the Navy—though the Navy still
has final cut of the film. In fact, passages of
the flick (some parts of the movie as well as
some outtakes and special scenes) are being
used as SEALS training videos. All this insider
stuff is great trivia, but it’s hard not to see the
film as a recruitment vehicle in and of itself.
That said, it’s opening wide on Presidents’
Day, to lure the patriotic badasses among us.
of bad business and though the place has
been around for 100 years, it’s about to close.
Innkeeper Claire (Sara Paxton) seems to
think if she can prove the house is haunted,
the creep-seekers would spend the night
often enough to at least keep it open. She
and Luke (Pat Healy) are the sort to love
researching the Inn’s history, anyway—dusting
off their ghost manuals is no stretch. But
as soon as Claire takes the hunt seriously,
the ghosts outnumber the owners. Why,
oh why can’t the rooms be filled with paying,
friendly, flesh-and-blood guests? Must
they be dead and vindictive? Claire and Pat
HED
DEK
clearly need backup, so they call Kelly Mc-
Gillis fresh from an epic and career-reviving
part as a nun in Stake Land. The former Top
Gun star is this film’s answer to Poltergeist’s
Dr. Lesh and she brings the earth (and the
flesh) to this battle of spirits. Writer/director
Ti West has a short but potent list of credits
to his name: last year’s House of the Devil sent
up the ‘80s fear of Satanic sacrifice and his
debut The Roost was almost entirely set in a
barn and still gets namedropped as one of
the best low-budget horror discoveries in
the last ten years. For The Innkeepers, spirits
are decidedly high.
THE INNKEEPERS
THE ROOMS ARE FULL … OF GHOSTS
DISTRIBUTOR Magnolia Pictures CAST Sara Paxton, Pat Healy,
Kelly McGillis, Hamza Essalih, Peter Phok, Badie Ali, Greg
Newman, Larry Fesenden DIRECTOR Ti West SCREENWRITER Ti
West PRODUCER Malik B. Ali GENRE Horror RATING TBD RUN-
NING TIME 101 min. RELEASE DATE February 3, 2012
> If you ever talk to a real-life ghost hunter,
they’ll usually tell you the difference between
ghost movies and ghost hunting is
that real clues are subtler than the ones
in Poltergeist. But even if you don’t expect
gray entrails to fall out of your ceiling,
sometimes those subtleties border on undetectable.
Maybe that’s why you hire a
professional: ghosts don’t perform on cue. In
Ti West’s newest horror, the keepers of the
Yankee Peddler Inn have had a long stretch
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 41

BY SARA MARIA VIZCARRONDO
THE SITTER
WHY ARE THE KIDS CRYING?
COMING SOON
SHAME
IT’LL MAKE YOU BLUSH
AIN’T NO SHAME IN IT
MICHAEL FASSBENDER’S STAR HAS SKYROCKETED, ALLOWING HIM THE
FREEDOM FOR THIS EDGY SEXUAL DRAMA
DISTRIBUTOR Fox Searchlight CAST James Badge Dale, Carey
Mulligan, Michael Fassbender DIRECTOR Steve McQueen
SCREENWRITERS Steve McQueen, Abi Morgan PRODUCER Iain
Canning GENRE Drama RATING NC-17 for some explicit
sexual content RUNNING TIME TBD RELEASE DATE December
2, 2011 ltd.
By the people who made Hunger, Shame is
quickly gaining fame as the film in which
heartthrob Michael Fassbender bears his
throbbing parts. Shame is about a struggling
sex addict, and its frank ferocity makes it easy
to see why the subject hasn’t been broached
much before. But, let’s be honest—Fassbender
is one of today’s most attractive, charismatic
actors. If he was reading a phone book
in between the scenes of nudity and implied
sex, people would still line up to see it.
OUTRAGE AUTOREIJI
THE ULTIMATE JAPANESE GANGSTER
DISTRIBUTOR Magnolia Pictures CAST Eihi Shiina, Renji
Ishibashi, Takeshi Kitano, Kippei Shiina, Ryo Kase
DIRECTOR Takeshi Kitano SCREENWRITER Takeshi Kitano
PRODUCERS Masayuki Mori, Takio Yoshida GENRE Action/
Thriller; Japanese-language, subtitled RATING R for strong
brutal bloody violence throughout, language, a scene of
sexuality and some nudity RUNNING TIME 109 min. RELEASE
DATE December 2 NY/LA
Takeshi Kitano a.k.a. “Beat” Kitano has been
playing yakuza bad-asses in Japanese thrillers
since the ‘70s. Outrage casts him in the sort
of role that gives that legacy heft—which
makes sense he also wrote and directed it. In
the film, Kitano plays a grizzled mobster veteran
who’s graduated from tattooed criminal
to stock market swindler. But making it big
isn’t making it out and even in that thousand
dollar suit, he’s packing heat.
SLEEPING BEAUTY
BUT THE MEN ARE NO PRINCE
CHARMING
DISTRIBUTOR IFC Films CAST Emily Browning, Rachael
Blake, Michael Dorman, Mirrah Foulkes, Joel Tobeck,
Henry Nixon DIRECTOR Julia Leigh SCREENWRITER Julia Leigh
PRODUCER Jessica Brentnall GENRE Drama RATING TBD
RUNNING TIME TBA RELEASE DATE December 2, 2011 ltd.
This touchy TMI arthouse flick would make
a good double bill with Shame. Fresh off an
ass-kicking stint in Sucker Punch, star Emily
Browning plays submissive in this film
about a cathouse that as a sidestep to selling
sex, sells beautiful sleeping girls who are
yours to play with—provided you follow
some rules. Based on a novel, this directorial
debut by Julia Leigh is vetted by Australian
director Jane Campion (The Piano, Holy
Smoke). Sounds dreamy.
KNUCKLE
NO FAKE PUNCHES
DISTRIBUTOR Cinedigm DIRECTOR Ian Palmer PRODUCERS Teddy
Leifer, Ian Palmer GENRE Documentary RATING R for violent
content and language RUNNING TIME 92 min. RELEASE DATE
December 2, 2011 ltd.
Remember that awesome scene in Snatch,
when Jason Statham made Brad Pitt fight in
a livestock pen and the whole community
lived out of rickety mobile homes? Well,
that’s not just a Guy Ritchie fantasy. Knuckle
is about two bare-knuckle fighters in a clan
of Irish travelers. There are no trophies,
titles, no novelty-sized checks—just hardwon
reputations. In a culture already reliant
on badassery for survival, these men must
win these knockdown, drag-out battles in
barns and empty fields so they can be the
next warrior-king of the clan. Hardcore.
DISTRIBUTOR Fox CAST Sam Rockwell, Jonah Hill DIRECTOR
David Gordon Green SCREENWRITERS Brian Gatewood, Alessandro
Tanaka PRODUCER Michael De Luca GENRE Comedy
RATING R for crude and sexual content, pervasive language,
drug material and some violence RUNNING TIME TBD RELEASE
DATE December 9, 2011
Director David Gordon Green, a man of epic
indie pedigree (George Washington, All the
Real Girls), momentarily turns away from
the pot comedies he’s made of late for this
raunchy remake of the John Hughes classic,
Adventures in Babysitting. Jonah Hill plays a
suspended college student with a crush on
a girl who could care less. Strapped for cash,
he lets himself get suckered into babysitting
the neighbor’s three kids. They’re collectively
smarter than he is, which is helpful
when Hill pushes his way into a shady
quick-cash gig. This one seems more for the
now grown-up fans of the original than for a
new generation.
IN DARKNESS
ANOTHER HOLOCAUST OSCAR
CONTENDER
DISTRIBUTOR Sony Pictures Classics CAST Robert
Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann, Maria Schrader, Agnieszka
Grochowska DIRECTOR Agnieszka Holland SCREENWRITER
David F. Shamoon PRODUCERS Steffen Reuter, Patrick
Knippel, Marc-Daniel Dichant, Leander Carell, Juliusz
Machulski, Paul Stephens, Eric Jordan GENRE Drama;
Polish-, German-, Yiddish-, Ukranian-, Hebrew- and
Russian-language, subtitled RATING TBD RUNNING TIME 140
min. RELEASE DATE December 9 NY/LA
Based on the book In the Sewers of Lvov, this
harrowing Holocaust drama watches a
dozen Jews survive a year in a sewer. Their
protector (a word used loosely) is a Catholic
guard who’s being paid to sniff out runners
but chooses their gelt over Nazi gold. The
guard is neither principled nor a monster—
and just as much can be said about the
survivors, who live in putrid circumstances
underground but face their own complicated
moral conundrum. The Polish nominee
for Best Foreign Language Oscar.
TINKER, TAILOR,
SOLDIER, SPY
SPY VS SPY VS SPY VS SPY
DISTRIBUTOR Focus Features CAST Colin Firth, Gary Oldman,
Tom Hardy, Ralph Fiennes, John Hurt, Ciarán Hinds, Mark
Strong, Toby Jones, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen
Graham, Michael Fassbender DIRECTOR Tomas Alfredson
SCREENWRITERS Bridget O’Connor, Peter Straughan
PRODUCERS Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan GENRE Thriller RATING R
for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language RUNNING
TIME TBD RELEASE DATE December 9, 2011
John LeCarre is to espionage what Stephen
King is to horror, and this is the second
film based on his 1974 spy thriller. George
Smiley (Gary Oldman) retired under less
than distinguished circumstances. But
42 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

when a Soviet double agent is identified
in the upper echelons of MI6, someone
has to find him. Set in the ’70s, Tinker is
swimming in hot British talent: Colin
Firth, John Hurt, Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones
all play elder MI6 statesmen, with the
younger crop played by Mark Strong and
Tom Hardy, who was brought in when first
choice Michael Fassbender was too busy
playing Magneto.
YOUNG ADULT
THIS MEAN GIRL HASN’T GROWN UP
DISTRIBUTOR Paramount CAST Charlize Theron, J.K. Simmons,
Patrick Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser, Patton Oswalt DIRECTOR
Jason Reitman SCREENWRITER Diablo Cody PRODUCERS Diablo
Cody, Lianne Halfon, Mason Novick, Jason Reitman,
Russell Smith, Charlize Theron GENRE Comedy
RATING R for language and some sexual content
RUNNING TIME 94 min. RELEASE DATE December 9 ltd.
December 16 Wide
Following their hit collaboration
on Juno, hipster screenwriter Diablo
Cody and dramedy director Jason
Reitman re-team for this comedy
about a young adult novelist in a
very adult downward spiral. After her
divorce, Mavis (Oscar winner Charlize
Theron) decides to marry her high
school sweetheart, so she returns to
her hometown to find Buddy Slade
(Patrick Wilson) happily married
and mightily disinterested. With a
great cast and a release during Oscar
season, this title looks more like a
high pedigree summer film than an
awards contender—but with the
team behind it, expectations are high.
WE NEED TO TALK
ABOUT KEVIN
MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE
DONE?
DISTRIBUTOR Oscilloscope CAST John C. Reilly, Tilda
Swinton, Lauren Fox, Siobhan Fallon, Ezra Miller,
Ursula Parker, Ashley Gerasimovich DIRECTOR
Lynne Ramsay SCREENWRITER Lynne Ramsay
PRODUCERS Jennifer Fox, Robert Salerno, Luc
Roeg GENRE Suspense RATING R for disturbing
violence and behavior, some sexuality and
language RUNNING TIME 112 min. RELEASE DATE
December 9, 2011 ltd
Esteemed British filmmaker Lynne Ramsay
(Ratcatcher) directs this drama about a
mother (Tilda Swinton) whose son goes on
a killing spree and survives to tell about it.
On the heels of Beautiful Boy, a drama about
conflicted parents mourning a Columbinestyle
killer, We Need to Talk about Kevin hews
closer to psychological horror and asks
explicitly what parents leaving The Omen
or Joshua asked themselves: “Sometimes
kids seem outright evil, but they can’t be …
right?”
I MELT WITH YOU
THEY’LL DRINK TO THAT
DISTRIBUTOR Magnolia Pictures CAST Rob Lowe, Carla
Gugino, Thomas Jane, Jeremy Piven, Sasha Grey,
Christian McKay DIRECTOR Mark Pellington SCREENWRITER
Glen Porter PRODUCERS Rob Cowan, Mark Pellington,
Norman Reiss GENRE Drama RATING R for pervasive drug
use and language, some violence and sexual content
RUNNING TIME 116 min. RELEASE DATE December 9, 2011 ltd.
This drama about four college friends
finds their bond is like a keg that’s been
tapped. Usually, these men are successful,
upstanding adults. But when they
annually regroup, the only goal is to get
blasted. We can expect piercing discomfort
from director Mark Pellington, an
award-winning music video director
who edged into edgier stuff. Post-porn
SHE ONLY LOOKS CUDDLY
CHARLIZE THERON PLAYS A DESTROYER OF WORLDS—
OR AT LEAST OF HER SUBURBAN SMALL TOWN
star Sasha Grey appears at the party, her
professional history lending a threat to
the men in the house.
PINA
A TRULY NEW TAKE ON 3D
DISTRIBUTOR IFC Films DIRECTOR Wim Wenders PRODUCERS
Wim Wenders, Gian-Piero Ringel GENRE Documentary
RATING TBD RUNNING TIME 106 min. RELEASE DATE December
23, 2011 NY
Pina is a 3D documentary collaboration
between epic German choreographer Pina
Bausch and German auteur Wim Wenders
(Buena Vista Social Club, Don’t Come Knocking).
This dance film naturally unites the fascinating
physicalities of Bausch’s dances with the
sense of movement that’s made Wenders’
docs impossible to look away from. Of course
it’s artier than Step Up 3D, but that’s part of
the package—Pina is one of a handful of films
successfully lending more credibility to a 3D
landscape that’s been soiled by sloppy conversions.
Undiscouraged, this master filmmaker
is using the medium to enduring ends.
IN THE LAND OF
BLOOD AND HONEY
A TABLOID STAR GOES BEHIND THE
CAMERA
DISTRIBUTOR FilmDistrict CAST Zana Marjanovic,
Goran Kostic, Rade Serbedzija DIRECTOR Angelina
Jolie SCREENWRITER Angelina Jolie PRODUCER
Graham King GENRE Drama RATING R for war
violence and atrocities including rape, sexuality,
nudity and language RUNNING TIME TBD RELEASE
DATE December 23, 2011
The struggles in Bosnia are more than
political when a Bosnian woman and
a Serbian man fall in love during the
Bosnian War. The circumstances of
their national conflict put the lovers
in and out of contact until the woman
is imprisoned in a camp the man
guards. As the politics of surviving
war and the challenges of being
together appear insurmountable, the
couple struggles to stay in each other’s
orbit. This is actress Angeilna Jolie’s
debut as a writer/director, which was
swiftly bought at Cannes without so
much as a public screening. Oscar
attention is likely, even if first-time
helmers seldom earn statuettes.
THE DARKEST
HOUR
LOOK OUT, KREMLIN -- THE ALIENS
ARE COMING
DISTRIBUTOR Summit Entertainment CAST Emile
Hirsch, Olivia Thirlby, Max Minghella, Rachael
Taylor, Joel Kinnaman DIRECTOR Chris Gorak
SCREENWRITER Leslie Bohem, M.T. Ahern, Jon
Spaihts PRODUCERS Tom Jacobson, Timur Bekmambetov
GENRE Science Fiction RATING PG13 for sci-fi action
violence and some language RUNNING TIME TBD RELEASE DATE
December 25, 2011
So far the least publicized of the 2011 Christmas
Day releases (the other two are Extremely
Loud and Incredibly Close and War Horse), this
sci-fi suspense thriller takes a cast of indie
darlings and asks what these pretty people
would do in the wake of an alien attack. Add
to their troubles: they’re Americans tourists
in Moscow. Their pictures of the Kremlin are
gonna be a little bit charred.
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 43

SMALL FILMS, BIG POTENTIAL
BOOK IT!
BY SARA VIZCARRONDO
EVERYDAY SUNSHINE: THE
STORY OF FISHBONE
Blood, sweat and funk
Funk was the unifying force joining five
black teens in LA’s school system. The
future band members of Fishbone met
on the daily bus. Outlandish ringleader
A BRAND NEW SOUND
FISHBONE BROKE BARRIERS—SO WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
Norwood Fischer had wild clothes but
charisma to spare—his idea to start a band
started with the curiousity to learn an instrument.
(He learned more than one and
so did the other band members.) Initially,
Fishbone surprised audiences. They didn’t
sound like “black music” (though their
lyrics were often about race issues)
and their mix of punk/funk was
always accompanied by crazy-ass
showmanship—it’s almost like they
thought “band” was another word
for “noisy circus.” Even in LA’s rising
punk scene, these guys defined different.
On the one hand, this means
even people who weren’t fans of
their sound approved of their agenda—on
the other hand, this meant
their sound couldn’t ever reach a
broad niche. Narrated by Lawrence
Fishbourne, this doc follows the
band on tour and provides some
insight into their past dramas with
animated sequences that keep the
tempo light. For fans of the band, it’s
an easy sell, but bigger audiences
can be made by tapping into local
and school music communities.
These guys are lifers—they don’t make it
look easy but they do it with everything
they’ve got.
DIRECTOR/PRODUCERS Lev Anderson, Chris Metzler GENRE
Documentary RATING Unrated RUNNING TIME 85 min. RE-
LEASE DATE Unset
CONTACT: filmmakers@fishbonedocumentary.com
Perfect
together.
From stadiums to beach resorts and everything
in between – wherever food meets fun, trust PCI
for your food packaging needs.
Discover great PCI service and our superior range
of stock and custom design packaging – including
leakproof popcorn bags, foil bags, 2 and 4 cup drink
holders, pizza boxes and a wide range of food trays.
Perfect for your event, perfect for your customers.
PCI and you – a perfect match.
To find out more simply call 314-329-9700
or email info@packagingconceptsinc.com
greener, cleaner packaging concepts
www.packagingconceptsinc.com
Eco Select ® is a trademark
of Wausau Paper Mills, Inc.
44 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

ELECTRIC BOOGALOO
A NEW GENERATION TAKES TO THE STREETS
THE FURIOUS FORCE OF RHYMES
Hip Hop International Style
What began as the underground merging of funk and rap in ‘80s
New York morphed into an international sound, a frequency that
people from England to China could grasp and relate to. France’s
highly diverse ghettos housed communities of rappers and b-boys.
In East Germany, skinheads wrote songs about being the highpressure
cushion zone between the Iron Curtain and the middle
class. And Palestinians have found a way to be heard outside their
political pigeonhole. What we hear in all these bands is the urgency
that comes from oppression, but also the necessity to give their
experience a voice. These musicians are all tapped into this energy
that transcends the specifics of the individual—an episode with a
teen singer on a park bench shows her rapping with an odd delicacy,
but her actual descriptions of the world around her are coarse.
Furious Force is a travelogue with a great nose for music and an even
better nose for the kind of vibrancy that keeps the fires burning.
The non-hip hop fans may be converted. Working in conjunction
with a music store is a great way to get your music-literate audience
members involved.
DIRECTOR Joshua Atesh Litle PRODUCERS Serge Lalou, Steve Lawrence, Joshua Atesh Litle
GENRE Documentary RATING Unrated RUNNING TIME 84 min.
CONTACT: Daniela Elstner / d.elstner@docandfilm.com
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 45

BOOK IT >
BOX[UR]SHORTS
MAN ON A MISSION
BUT HAS PAUL WATSON GONE TOO FAR?
Ah, the film short. The genre
stretches to accommodate music
video, commercials, industrial
films, educational films, experiments—but
all those categories
aside, the most valued short film
is the calling card. It’s the industry’s
recruiting ground, what film
schools advise their students and
graduates to produce and virally
transmit and what established producers
make to keep themselves
looking viable between major
projects.
Once a year the Oscars release
three collections of curated shorts
to theaters (their nominees), but
there are millions of shorts and
only one you. Maybe you could
use some help with that.
Enter Giacun Caduff. To puts these
bite-sized movies into a digestible
package he started box[ur]shorts,
a short film jukebox that recalls the
Scopitone of the ’60s, the standup
juke box for music videos. A touchscreen
directs you to a dozen or
so curated shorts sorted by genre
and you choose from among them.
Caduff says the jukeboxes work
particularly well in places people
wait, like restaurants, bars, coffee
houses and laundromats. He calls it
a “yearlong short film exhibition,”
and by locating it in such common
places it creates a comfort—“it
becomes part of viewers everyday
experiences.” So, hey—why not try
one in your theater?
ECO-PIRATE: THE STORY OF PAUL WATSON
Monster Boat Smash
Every hero story begins with a tragedy, and Paul Watson’s happened in 1975, when he and
other Greenpeace members watched a Russian whaling ship decimate a pod of whales—the
blood and chaos were horrifying. Both a founding member and infamous defector of Greenpeace,
Watson is the sort of man who thinks idealism dissolves without vigilance. And
damn is he vigilant. Ever a showman, he sails his tanker towards illegal whaling boats in the
“Whale Safe” area surrounding Antarctica. Like a pirate, he damages the whaling ships and
performs the seafaring equivalent of a citizen’s arrest. He can’t legally apprehend the oceanic
evildoers, but he can play Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” and sail his boat into theirs. His
Sea Shepard Society works to stop fisherman who operate illegally in protected areas, but
their means are as illegal as their enemies. The mutual lawlessness endangers everyone, but
Watson takes umbrage with pacifists. He says that “bearing witness,” a Quaker principle
upon which Greenpeace was founded, is pointless because “when you see a woman being
raped or a child being molested, you try to stop it—you don’t bear witness.” This is his
rationale for the high-visibility stunts he’s pulled when saving aquatic mammals, be they
cetaceans or baby seals. His commitment and dedication are unquestioned but in Trish Dolman’s
doc about the man, his ego doesn’t get off as easy. He’s a friend to fish and an enemy to
most everyone else but this badass is fun to watch. If properly marketed, this doc could be
bigger than The Cove.
DIRECTOR Trish Dolman PRODUCERS Trish Dolman, Kevin Eastwood GENRE Documentary RATING Unrated RUNNING TIME 110 min.
RELEASE DATE TBD
CONTACT: eOne Films, Anne Reynolds / 416 646 3824 / eonefilms.com
46 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

08.17.12 Focus Features ParaNorman
08.31.12
UTV
Communications
Joker
09.14.12 Disney Finding Nemo
09.14.12
Sony / Screen
Gems
Resident Evil 5
2011
12.21.11 Paramount The Adventures of Tintin
12.23.11
Reliance Big
Entertainment
Don 2
12.25.11 Summit The Darkest Hour
2012
01.13.12 Disney Beauty and the Beast
01.20.12 Screen Gems Underworld Awakening
01.27.12 Warner Bros.
02.10.12 Fox
02.17.12 Sony
03.02.12 Paramount
Journey 2:
The Mysterious Island
Star Wars: Episode I - The
Phantom Menace 3D
Ghost Rider:
Spirit of Vengeance
Hansel and Gretel:
Witch Hunters
03.02.12 Universal Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax
03.09.12
RELEASE
CALENDAR
Walt Disney
Pictures
John Carter
03.30.12 Sony/Columbia The Pirates! Band of Misfits
03.30.12 Warner Bros. Wrath of the Titans
04.06.12 Paramount Titanic
05.25.12 Sony Men in Black 3
06.08.12 DreamWorks Madagascar 3
06.08.12 Fox Prometheus
06.15.12 Warner Bros. Jack the Giant Killer
09.21.12 Sony Hotel Transylvania
09.21.11 N/A Dredd
10.05.12 Disney Frankenweenie
10.05.12 Lionsgate
10.26.12
The Weinstein
Company
The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre 3D
Halloween 3D
11.02.12 Disney Wreck-It Ralph
11.21.12
Paramount/
DreamWorks
Rise of the Guardians
11.21.12 Warner Bros. Gravity
11.21.12 Universal 47 Ronin
12.14.12 Warner Bros.
The Hobbit:
An Unexpected Journey
12.21.12 20th Century Fox Life of Pi
12.25.12 Warner Bros. The Great Gatsby
2013
01.18.13 Disney Monsters, Inc.
01.25.13
Sony/Screen
Gems
Planet B-Boy
03.08.13 Disney Oz: The Great and Powerful
03.22.13
Paramount/
DreamWorks
The Croods
05.10.13 Warner Bros. Pacific Rim
05.24.13 Fox Leafmen
06.21.13 Disney Monsters University
09.13.13 Disney The Little Mermaid
10.04.13 Disney Untitled Henry Selick Film
10.11.13 Fox Walking With Dinosaurs
11.08.13
Paramount/
DreamWorks
Me and My Shadow
11.27.13 Disney Untitled Disney/Pixar Film
06.22.12 Disney Brave
06.22.12 20th Century Fox
Abraham Lincoln:
Vampire Hunter
12.13.13 Disney
2014
The Hobbit:
There and Back Again
07.13.12 20th Century Fox Ice Age: Continental Drift
07.27.12 Summit Step Up 4
05.02.14 Sony The Amazing Spider-Man 2
05.30.14 Disney Disney/Pixar Untitled Film

INSPIRED BY
TRUE EVENTS,
KILLER ELITE IS
AN ACTION-
ADVENTURE
SPY FILM
DEBUTING ON
BLU-RAY
COMBO PACK WITH ULTRAVIOLET
AND DVD >>
48 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

JASON STATHAM
CLIVE OWEN
ROBERT DENIRO
KILLER ELITE
ON BLURAY
AND DVD
JAN. 10, 2012
DECEMBER 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 49

ADAPTIVE MICRO
7840 North 86th St.
Milwaukee, WI 53224
800-558-7022
ales@adaptivedisplays.com
www.ams-i.com
PG 48
CARDINAL SOUND AND MOTION
PICTURE SYSTEMS
6330 Howard Ln.
Elkridge, MD 21075
401-7965300
cardinal@cardinalsound.com
www.cardinalsound.com
PG 48
CHRISTIE DIGITAL SYSTEMS
10550 Camden Dr.
Cypress, CA 90630
Craig Sholder / 714-236-8610
craig.sholder@christiedigital.com
www.christiedigital.com
Inside front cover
C. CRETORS & COMPANY
3243 N. California Ave.
Chicago, IL 60618
800-228-1885
www.cretors.com
PG 19
DATASAT DIGITAL
9631 Topanga Canyon Pl.
Chatsworth, CA 91311
818-531-0003
www.datasatdigital.com
Inside back cover
DOLBY LABORATORIES
100 Potrero Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94103
Christie Ventura
415-558-2200
cah@dolby.com
www.dolby.com
PG 13, 47
DOLPHIN SEATING
313 Remuda St.
Clovis, NM 88101
575-762-6468
www.dolphinseating.com
PG 49
ENPAR AUDIO
505-807-2154
Cell: 505-615-2913
stetsonsnell@enparaudio.com
www.enparaudio.com
PG 51
FRANKLIN DESIGNS
208 Industrial Dr.
Ridgeland, MS 39157
601-853-9005
franklindesigns@aol.com
www.franklindesigns.com
PG 23
GDC TECHNOLOGY LLC
3500 W Olive Ave. Suite 940
Burbank, CA 91505
818-972-4370
www.gdc-tech.com
PG 35
HARKNESS SCREENS
Unit A, Norton Road
Stevenage, Herts
SG1 2BB
United Kingdom
+44 1438 725200
sales@harkness-screens.com
www.harkness-screens.com
PG 21, 23
HURLEY SCREEN
110 Industry Ln.
P.O. Box 296
Forest Hill, MD 21050
Gorman W. White
410-879-3022
info@hurleyscreen.com
www.hurleyscreen.com
PG 41
IMM SOUND
Diagonal 177
08018 Barcelona, Spain
+34 93 485 3880
info@immsound.com
immsound.com
PG 5
INTERNATIONAL CONSULTING &
TRADE ASSOCIATES, INC.
P. O. Box 370503
West Hartford, CT 06137-0503
Irv Schein, Director
860-523-4506
Ischein123@cs.com
www.ictaweb.org
PG 25
MASTERIMAGE 3D
4111 W. Alameda Ave. Suite 312
Burbank, CA 91505, USA
818-558-7900
www. masterimage3d.com
PG 11
MAROEVICH, O’SHEA
& COUGHLAN
44 Montgomery St., 17th Fl.
San Francisco, CA 94104
Steve Elkins
800-951-0600
selkins@maroevich.com
www.mocins.com
PG 3
MOVING IMAGE TECHNOLOGIES
17760 Newhope St., Ste. B
Fountain Valley, CA 92708-5442
714-751-7998
sales@movingimagetech.com
www.movingimagetech.com
PG 15
PACKAGING CONCEPTS, INC.
9832 Evergreen Industrial Dr.
St. Louis, MO 63123
John Irace / 314-329-9700
jji@packagingconceptsinc.com
www.packagingconceptsinc.com
PG 44
PROCTOR COMPANIES
10497 Centennial Rd.
Littleton, CO 80127-4218
Bruce Proctor
303-973-8989
sales@proctorco.com
www.proctorco.com
PG 24
QSC
1665 MacArthur Blvd.
Costa Mesa, CA 92626
Francois Godfrey / 714-754-6175
francois_godfrey@qscaudio.com
www.qscaudio.com
PG 39
QUARTZ LAMPS INC.
4424 Aicholtz Rd.
Cincinnati, OH 45245
888-557-7195
sales@qlistore.com
swww.qlistore.com
PG 52
QUBE CINEMA INC.
601 S. Glenoaks Blvd., Ste 102
Burbank, CA 91502
818-748-9057
sales@qubecinema.com
www.qubecinema.com
PG 29
QUEST
A DIVISION OF THERMA-STOR
4201 Lien Rd.
Madison, WI 53704
800-533-7533
www.questprotect.com
PG 48
READY THEATRE SYSTEMS
4 Hartford Blvd.
Hartford, MI 49057
Mary Snyder
865-212-9703x114
sales@rts-solutions.com
www.rts-solutions.com.com
PG 48
SCREENVISION
1411 Broadway, 33rd Fl.
New York, NY 10018
212-752-5774
www.screenvision
Back cover
SENSIBLE CINEMA SOFTWARE
7216 Sutton Pl.
Fairview, TN 37062
Rusty Gordon
615-799-6366
rusty@sensiblecinema.com
www.sensiblecinema.com
PG 49
STRONG CINEMA PRODUCTS
(Division of Ballantyne Inc.)
4350 McKinley St.
Omaha, NE 68112
Ray Boegner
402-453-4444
ray.boegner@btn-inc.com
www.ballantyne-omaha.com
PG 33
TK ARCHITECTS
106 West 11th St., #1900
Kansas City, MO 64105-1822
816-842-7552
tkapo.tharch.com
www.tkarch.com
PG 49
USHIO
5440 Cerritos Ave.
Cypress, CA 90630
714-236-8600
www.ushio.com
PG 45
USL
181 Bonetti Dr.
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
805-549-0161
usl@uslinc.com
www.uslinc.com
PG 11
VISTA ENTERTAINMENT
SOLUTIONS LTD.
Vista Entertainment Solutions
8383 Wilshire Blvd
Suite 302
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
323-944-0470
323-951-1016
Derek Forbes
Derek.Forbes@vistaUSA.com
www.vistaUSA.com
PG 7
WHITE CASTLE
555 West Goodale St.
Columbus, OH 43215
Timothy Carroll
614-559-2453
carrollt@whitecastle.com
www.whitecastle.com
PG 1
Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation
(All Periodicals Publications Except Requester Publications)
1. Publication Title 2. Publication Number 3. Filing Date
Boxoffice 0 0 0 6 8 5 2 7 October 2011
_
4. Issue Frequency 5. Number of Issues Published Annually 6. Annual Subscription Price
12 x per year 12 59.95
7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication (Not printer) (Street, city, county, state, and ZIP+4®)
9107 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 450, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Contact Person
Peter Cane
Telephone (Include area code)
310-876-9090
8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher (Not printer)
230 Park Ave., Suite 1000, New York, NY 10169
9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor (Do not leave blank)
Publisher (Name and complete mailing address)
Peter Cane, 230 Park Ave., Suite 1000, New York, NY 10169
Editor (Name and complete mailing address)
Amy Nicholson, 9107 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 450, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Managing Editor (Name and complete mailing address)
10. Owner (Do not leave blank. If the publication is owned by a corporation, give the name and address of the corporation immediately followed by the
names and addresses of all stockholders owning or holding 1 percent or more of the total amount of stock. If not owned by a corporation, give the
names and addresses of the individual owners. If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, give its name and address as well as those of
each individual owner. If the publication is published by a nonprofit organization, give its name and address.)
Full Name
11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or
Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or
Other Securities. If none, check box
Full Name
Complete Mailing Address
Boxoffice Media LP 230 Park Ave., Suite 1000, New York, NY 10169
None
Complete Mailing Address
12. Tax Status (For completion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at nonprofit rates) (Check one)
The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes:
X Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months
Has Changed During Preceding 12 Months (Publisher must submit explanation of change with this statement)
PS Form 3526, September 2007 (Page 1 of 3 (Instructions Page 3)) PSN 7530-01-000-9931 PRIVACY NOTICE: See our privacy policy on www.usps.com
13. Publication Title
15.
Extent and Nature of Circulation
a. Total Number of Copies (Net press run)
b. Paid
Circulation
(By Mail
and
Outside
the Mail)
Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS
Form 3541 (Include paid distribution above nominal
rate, advertiser's proof copies, and exchange copies)
c. Total Paid Distribution (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4))
d. Free or
Nominal
Rate
Distribution
(By Mail
and
Outside
the Mail)
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
(1)
(2)
(3)
Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (Sum of 15d (1), (2), (3) and (4))
Total (Sum of 15f and g)
Percent Paid
(15c divided by 15f times 100)
Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on
PS Form 3541(Include paid distribution above nominal
rate, advertiser's proof copies, and exchange
copies)
Paid Distribution Outside the Mails Including Sales
Through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter
Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside USPS®
(4) Paid Distribution by Other Classes of Mail Through
the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail®)
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
Free or Nominal Rate Outside-County
Copies included on PS Form 3541
Free or Nominal Rate In-County Copies Included
on PS Form 3541
Free or Nominal Rate Copies Mailed at Other
Classes Through the USPS (e.g. First-Class Mail)
Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail
(Carriers or other means)
Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15e)
Copies not Distributed (See Instructions to Publishers #4 (page #3))
16. Publication of Statement of Ownership
X If the publication is a general publication, publication of this statement is required. Will be printed
in the ________________________ issue of this publication.
17. Signature and Title of Editor, Publisher, Business Manager, or Owner
PS Form 3526, September 2007 (Page 2 of 3)
14. Issue Date for Circulation Data Below
Boxoffice October 2011
Average No. Copies Each Issue
During Preceding 12 Months
No. Copies of Single Issue
Published Nearest to
Filing Date
4497 4897
3551 3667
3557 3667
620 1120
620 1120
4177 4787
320 110
4497 4897
85.2% 76.6%
Publication not required.
I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this
form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil
sanctions (including civil penalties).
Date
50 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

CLASSIFIED ADS
DRIVE-IN CONSTRUCTION
DRIVE-IN SCREEN TOWERS since 1945. Selby
Products Inc., P.O. Box 267, Richfield, OH 44286.
Phone: 330-659-6631.
EQUIPMENT FOR SALE
3D/DIGITAL EQUIPMENT FOR SALE: Barco DP-
2000 projector; lens; lamp; 3D/server; etc. Purchase
out-right for $80,000. Equipment list provided
upon request. Contact: Michael Schwartz; email:
mschwartz@pennprolaw.com; phone: (212) 354-
7700 x 3012.
3D/DIGITAL EQUIPMENT LEASE AVAILABLE:
Barco DP-2000 projector; lens; lamp; and 3D/server;
etc. Assume lease at $2,200 per month/42 months
remaining or purchase out-right at $85,000. Equipment
list provided upon request. Contact: Michael
Schwartz; email: mschwartz@pennprolaw.com;
phone: (212) 354-7700 x 3012
ASTER AUDITORIUM SEATING & AUDIO. We
offer the best pricing on good used projection and
sound equipment. Large quantities available. Please
visit our website, www.asterseating.com, or call
1-888-409-1414.
BOX OFFICE TICKETING AND CONCESSIONS
EQUIPMENT. Stand-alone ticketing or fully integrated
theater ticketing and/or concessions systems
are available. These fully tested, remanufactured
Pacer Theatre Systems have extended full-service
contracts available. Complete ticketing and concessions
systems starting at $2,975. Call Jason: 800-
434-3098; www.sosticketing.com.
WWW.CINEMACONSULTANTSINTERNATION-
AL.COM. New and used projection and sound
equipment, theater seating, drapes, wall panels, FM
transmitters, popcorn poppers, concessions counters,
xenon lamps, booth supplies, cleaning supplies,
more. Call Cinema Consultants and Services
International. Phone: 412-343-3900; fax: 412-343-
2992; sales@cinemaconsultantsinternational.com.
CY YOUNG IND. INC. still has the best prices for
replacement seat covers, out-of-order chair covers,
cupholder armrests, patron trays and on-site chair
renovations! Please call for prices and more information.
800-729-2610. cyyounginc@aol.com.
DOLPHIN SEATING At www.dolphinseating.com
Find today’s best available new seating deals 575-
762-6468 Sales Office.
TWO CENTURY PROJECTORS, complete with
base, soundheads, lenses. Pott’s 3-deck platter,like
new. Rebuilt Christie lamp, goes to 150 amps. Model
H-30. 603-747-2608.
EQUIPMENT WANTED
OLD MARQUEE LETTERS WANTED Do you have
the old style slotted letters? We buy the whole pile.
Any condition. Plastic, metal, large, small, dirty,
cracked, painted, good or bad. Please call 800-545-
8956 or write mike@pilut.com.
MOVIE POSTERS WANTED: Collector paying
TOP $$$ for movie posters, lobby cards, film stills,
press books and memorabilia. All sizes, any condition.
Free appraisals! CASH paid immediately! Ralph
DeLuca, 157 Park Ave., Madison, NJ 07940; phone:
800-392-4050; email: ralph@ralphdeluca.com; www.
ralphdeluca.com.
POSTERS & FILMS WANTED: Cash available for
movie posters and films (trailers, features, cartoons,
etc.). Call Tony 903-790-1930 or email postersandfilms@aol.com.
OLDER STEREO EQUIPMENT AND SPEAKERS,
old microphones, old theater sound systems and old
vacuum tubes. Phone Tim: 616-791-0867.
COLLECTOR WANTS TO BUY: We pay top money
for any 1920-1980 theater equipment. We’ll buy all
theater-related equipment, working or dead. We remove
and pick up anywhere in the U.S. or Canada.
Amplifiers, speakers, horns, drivers, woofers, tubes,
Brilliant Lighting Solutions
for a Brighter Future!
transformers; Western Electric, RCA, Altec, JBL, Jensen,
Simplex & more. We’ll remove installed equipment
if it’s in a closing location. We buy projection
and equipment, too. Call today: 773-339-9035.
cinema-tech.com email ILG821@aol.com.
AMERICAN ENTERTAINMENT PRODUCTS LLC
is buying projectors, processors, amplifiers, speakers,
seating, platters. If you are closing, remodeling
or have excess equipment in your warehouse
and want to turn equipment into cash, please call
866-653-2834 or email aep30@comcast.net. Need
to move quickly to close a location and dismantle
equipment? We come to you with trucks, crew and
equipment, no job too small or too large. Call today
for a quotation: 866-653-2834. Vintage equipment
wanted also! Old speakers like Western Electric and
Altec, horns, cabinets, woofers, etc. and any tube
audio equipment, call or email: aep30@comcast.net.
AASA IS ASTER AUDITORIUM SEATING & AU-
DIO. We buy and sell good used theater equipment.
We provide dismantling services using our trucks
and well-equipped, professional crew anywhere in
the United States. Please visit our website, www.asterseating.com,
or call 1-888-409-1414.
FOR SALE
3D/DIGITAL EQUIPMENT FOR SALE OR LEASE:
Barco DP-2000 projector; lens; lamp; 3D/server; etc.
Purchase out-right for $75,000 or assume balance of
lease term (3½ yrs.). Equipment list provided upon
request. Contact: Michael Schwartz; mschwartz@
pennprolaw.com. 212-354-7700 x 3012.
ALL FIRST RUN THEATRES: 4 screen in beautiful
northern Illinois town of 16,000, only theatre
in county, expansion possibilities, great potential
$399,000. 3 screen in southern Illinois town of
9,000, closest theatre 45 miles, $299,000. Successful
drive-in with huge drawing area and good customer
base $229,000 … better if sold as package.
217-549-3000, Principals only.
TWIN THEATRE WITH FOUR RENTALS IN ZEPH-
YRHILLS, FL (NE of Tampa) Rental income is more
than mortgage payments. Appraised at $325,000
land & building. Next in line for $60,000 improvement
Grant. Excellent Draft House possibility. larry.
rutan@verizon.net. Cell 813-299-0665.
ART DECO TWIN FOR SALE In Quaint Western
New York Town. NO COMPETITION. Colonial
Home Located Behind Theatre. $389K for Theatre
Only. $459K For Both. 585-610-8640.
FIRST RUN MOVIE THEATER. Vibrant Vermont
college town. Vaudeville stage, 3 screens, 298 seats,
renovated. $850,000. 802-999-9077.
FOR SALE Independent owned & operated, eightscreen,
all stadium-seating theater complex located
in suburban Chicago. Completely renovated
in 2004. Seating capacity for 1,774 people within
a 48,000-square-foot sqft building on 5.32 acres.
Preliminary site plan approval for expansion of additional
screens. Proximate to national/regional retail
and dining. Strong ticket and concession revenues.
Excellent business or investment opportunity. Contact
Kevin Jonas at 305-631-6303 for details.
FIVE-PLEX, FULLY EQUIPPED AND OPERATION-
AL: $735,000, land, bldg., equip., NW Wisconsin.
Priced $50,000 below appraised value. 715-550-
9601.
THEATER FOR RENT 1,500 seating capacity. No
hanging balconies. Largest single screen in Chicagoland.
Over 500,000 potential patrons, serving
NW side of Chicago and suburbs. Contact dkms72@
hotmail.com.
THEATERS FOR SALE Three screens (370 seats),
North Florida. First-run, no competition 60 miles.
Additional large multipurpose room (75 seats), with
HD projector on 13.5-by-7-foot screen for birthday
parties, conferences, receptions and café. Contact
850-371-0028.
HELP WANTED
WANTED THEATRE MANAGERS TO INTERVIEW
FOR BOOK on movie industry to talk about your
jobs, responsibilites and careers. What lessons have
you learned about the film business? What do love
about your job? You are important. Tell me your stories.
To set up a phone interview email davidsikich@
comcast.net
PARTNER AND/OR EXPERIENCED GM NEEDED
for ground floor opportunity in Arizona. New and
popular “Brew and View” concept in outstanding
area. Contact Stadiumtheatres@aol.com
HELP improve movie-goer experiences and the
industry, go to movie-goer-rights.org or youtube.
com/user/moviegoerrights
SERVICES
DULL FLAT PICTURE? RESTORE YOUR XENON
REFLECTORS! Ultraflat repolishes and recoats xenon
reflectors. Many reflectors available for immediate
exchange. (ORC, Strong, Christie, Xetron, others!)
Ultraflat, 20306 Sherman Way, Winnetka, CA
91306; 818-884-0184.
FROM DIRT TO OPENING DAY. 20-plus years of
theater experience with the know-how to get you
going. 630-417-9792.
SEATING
AGGRANDIZE YOUR THEATER, auditorium,
church or school with quality used seating. We carry
all makes of used seats as well as some new seats.
Seat parts are also available. Please visit our website,
www.asterseating.com, or call 888-409-1414.
ALLSTATE SEATING specializes in refurbishing,
complete painting, molded foam, tailor-made seat
covers, installations and removals. Please call for
pricing and spare parts for all types of theater seating.
Boston, Mass.; 617-770-1112; fax: 617-770-
1140.
DOLPHIN SEATING At www.dolphinseating.com,
find today’s best available new seating deals: 575-
762-6468 Sales Office.
THEATERS WANTED
WE’LL MANAGE YOUR THEATER OR SMALL
CHAIN FOR YOU. Industry veterans and current exhibitors
with 40-plus years’ experience. Will manage
every aspect of operations and maximize all profits
for you. Call John LaCaze at 801-532-3300.
WELL-CAPITALIZED, PRIVATELY HELD, TOP 50
THEATER CHAIN is looking to expand via theater
acquisitions. We seek profitable, first-run theater
complexes with 6 to 14 screens located anywhere in
the USA. Please call Mike at 320-203-1003 ext.105
or email: acquisitions@uecmovies.com
NATIONAL THEATRE ACQUISITION CO. site acquisition,
brokerage of theaters on a sale, purchase
or lease basis and related services. Phone: 248-350-
9090, email: rkomer@wkbldg.com.
52 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011

SOUND QUALITY.
sound decision.
Introducing the new standard in audio. The AP20 Audio Processor
offers an impressive collection of features for both the latest digital as well as
legacy analog sound systems - with 16-channels in/out and three expansion slots
for future development.
Supports Legacy Film
First expansion card designed with “A” chain film support.
Ideal for Alternative Content
Offers a wide range of inputs and stores multiple room EQs
to create the right listening environment.
Dirac Live® Room Optimization
Improves listener experience by correcting for room modes
and anomalies.
Cost Savings
Extends life of speakers and eliminates the need for crossovers,
automation systems, HDMI video conversion and any other
non-sync inputs.
8-Channel Upgradeable Audio Processor Also Available