BoxOffice® Pro - April 2011

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C I N E M A C O N C E L E B R A T I N G T H E M O V I E G O I N G E X P E R I E N C E BUD MAYO’S THE ALTERNATIVE CONTENT EXPERT ON LAUNCHING HIS NEW THEATER CHAIN AND WHAT EXHIBITION NEEDS NOW by Amy Nicholson A fter working in alternative e content, you’re launching a theater ter chain of your own for the second time. What have you learned from working with Cinedigm that you are excited to bring to you new chain, Digiplex? Well, one of the things I’ve learned ed is that very little in-theater marketing and exhibitor-generated t marketing has been done to promote these alternative t content programs. That’s going to certainly be a big focus for Digiplex—to use every tool in the toolbox: those provided by the content n distributor, ibutor, the content owner and by ourselves. Unlike a major Hollywood od movie, these programs don’t come with a hundred million dollar marketing budget provided by the studio, so it’s really incumbent upon the exhibitor himself to know how to communicate with the audience, e to know who they are, to be in touch with them in a variety of ways that the digital era enables: social media, the Internet, newsletters. Local charities and non-profits n-pr certainly love to take part. If it’s a classical sica l performance, it might very well be a group that enjoys classical music—beyond even the local symphony or performing arts center. For example, e, with our Kidtoons program, there’s a regional arts center er that’s our co-sponsor and we’ll cross-promote each other’s events. It takes a lot of creative thinking ing to come up with different marketing concepts. How do you come up with your ideas? Back in the days when I was building Clearview, I clearly had the same thoughts about how to fill seats that are empty 90 percent of the time, in particular Sunday to Thursday. Twelve years later, the digital era is here. Some of my ideas, I simply couldn’t do 12, 15 years ago at a traditional film-based movie theater chain. Now I can. There are a whole bunch of new ideas and great people at places like Cinedigm Entertainment and 30 30 BOXOFFICE PRO APRIL 2011
NCM Fathom Network—and the studios themselves are coming out with some great content. You add some 3D into the mix and you’ve got a whole new opportunity to fill those seats, which is really what it’s all about for exhibition. How do you fill empty seats? If you can fill them another 10 percent, you’re really making a difference in your movie theaters—and if you can do it in multiple locations over a period of time, you’ve really made a very significant difference to your bottom line. That’s interesting because it looks beyond needing to sell out a theater on opening weekend with a monster hit. We want to do that, too. We’re not looking to replace that. The bread and butter of these theaters is still the Hollywood features and we’re going to play them—and we’re going to play a lot of independent films, as well. But there’s an average of ten screens in a building and not all of them can be playing big tentpole movies from Hollywood, or even the better independent films like King’s Speech and Black Swan. It’s about supplementing what works, not replacing it. What have you learned about the range of audience appetites in the last decade that gives Digiplex an advantage? The first thing that we learned at Cinedigm Entertainment was to identify the audience. That means doing a little research about the demographics around each building. Then the next step is to try to communicate so that you have some interactivity with the audience. Once you’ve done that, it can inform your programming decisions—you’re a film buyer, but you’re also a curator. It takes a lot of extra time to examine the options, what can be played at certain times of the day and days of the week, because we know that moviegoers aren’t the same Wednesday night as they are on Friday or Saturday night. Once you know the audience, then you know what it is: what language, what ethnic groups, what socioeconomic category. The opera might not be for every theater, but boxing or football or soccer, basketball, certain types of music, certain genres of music—what would work in one theater may not work in another. Country and western may work very nicely in some towns, and others jazz or even classical music. Even within popular music, you have different genres. You start slicing and dicing the product. I’ve been doing this for forty years in a not-for-profit environment with a number of performing art centers where I chaired the board of trustees and helped to define how we program. What I’m doing here is taking this to much smaller venues which serve a much smaller radius around the theater and introducing programs that families can afford to do with content that might otherwise not even be available except in the major cities. For example, Dave Matthews Band, that Cinedigm brought out last year, properly marketed would be a huge hit at a twenty-dollar ticket. I emphasize properly marketed by the theaters. The Dave Matthews Band isn’t for everybody. Phish is something we learned a great deal about—last year, the places were packed and it was a huge success for those theaters. In fact, it caught many of the theaters way off-guard because people were milling in by the hundreds on a Wednesday night. And those are some unusual fans. These are events that we’d rather see programmatically. In other words, we’d rather not have a Dave Matthews concert in December and a Phish Concert in April and nothing in between. We really want a new program at least once a month in a certain category so people can begin to look for it in the theater and say: This theater is great—it’s a Digiplex theater and it’s going to be playing all this extra content and I better check regularly. People don’t come to concerts or sporting events the way they do movies, where they just show up. They generally have to plan for this because these are shared events. Usually groups say, “Let’s all go to a concert or a ballgame. Let’s mark our calendars.” Because it’s only going to play once or twice, unlike a movie that might run for three or four weeks. There’s a lot of talk about changes in the industry. At least through my eyes, I’m a lot less concerned about windows shrinking. I still want a discreet window for movies, but if it shrinks a few weeks it’s no big deal to me because most of the business is done within the first two or three weeks. To me, the tradeoff is that if alternative content emerges as something that could be played regularly throughout the year along with movies, there is room for everything. You were talking about demographics. What were you looking at when you decided your locations of your new Digiplex theaters and how many have you chosen? Our pipeline right now is about 300 screens. We’re picking the ones that, quite frankly, make sense to us. Good theaters and good geographical areas and good strategic areas because we want to be able to attract audiences from a fairly wide range around the theater for certain kinds of events. It might be as much as fifteen or twenty miles, so they’ve got to be good theaters. Right now, we’re looking essentially in four states: New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. We’d like to be fairly concentrated initially and then begin to move north into New England and south into the Mid Atlantic over time. Why is that? It’s a management issue. It’s just being able to pay attention to the theaters as we acquire them. To do the things we want to do, which are innovative and certainly different from the way that theaters have historically operated, we want them close by so we can pay attention and retrain staff. There’s a great talent pool in this industry and we want to tap into it, but in each case we have to reorient those talented people to do things in addition to what they’re already doing, which is to keep the popcorn fresh, to keep the restrooms clean and to make sure the sound and image quality are good and consistent. We need to become a part of the community in ways that we haven’t had to in the past, and that means, re-purposing people. We want to stay small enough to be able to test a lot of theories and a lot of new programs because it’s a lot easier to do when you’re smaller. We’ll move a little slowly for the first six months, but not that slowly. We’ll be adding theaters probably every month. What are you predicting for Digiplex by the end of 2011? By the end of this year, we should have about 150 screens, maybe more. We are targeting 1,000 screens in a three-year period, and for that we want a national footprint. We would like to have a presence in at least (continued on next page) APRIL 2011 BOXOFFICE PRO 31
Page 1 and 2: BOOKIT! OUR ROUNDUP OF FILMS THAT C
Page 3 and 4: WHY STAY TWO DIMENSIONAL? 3D IS NOW
Page 5 and 6: STOPPRESS Social networks are all t
Page 7 and 8: When it comes to 4K, all eyes are o
Page 9 and 10: MOVING PICTURES. FORWARD. More than
Page 12: EXECUTIVE SUITE > THE VIEW FROM VEG
Page 15 and 16: Bring [advertorial] movies to life
Page 18: ONCE A JOLLY SWAGMAN Confessions of
Page 22 and 23: FRONT OFFICE AWARD MIDNIGHT MOVIE M
Page 24 and 25: MARQUEE AWARD FOCUS ON FAMILY It’
Page 27 and 28: SHOW MAPS & EXHIBITOR LIST 26 BUD M
Page 29 and 30: AUGUSTUS BALLROOM FORUM BALLROOM C
Page 31: QSC Audio Products 613F Solo Cup Co
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Page 40: TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES C I N E
Page 50 and 51: 5 3 D m rr ro ro rom t e th a rs rs
Page 52 and 53: EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW > DUNCAN JONES
Page 56 and 57: NEW PRODUCTS C I N E M A C O N C E
Page 58: C I N E M A C O N C E L E B R A T I
Page 61 and 62: We’re the brightest! Projecting t
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