Boxoffice® Pro - August 2013

’N
Sync was at the height of its fame in
2001. The band was coming off of the
best-selling success of its album No
Strings Attached during a time when
record sales still mattered. The accompanying
world tour had also been a hit,
spawning an Imax version of one of the
group’s sold-out shows in Detroit. ’N
Sync: Bigger Than Live was released
in the giant-screen format in 2001 as
a 48-minute concert film. The movie grossed $44,082 in its opening
weekend and topped out its theatrical run at $1.8 million. By the end
of the decade, ’N Sync would no longer be releasing albums, and the
music industry would be turned on its
head. Concert movies, however, would be
entering a new age of financial viability.
The rise of digital media completely
changed the music industry. A byproduct
of that transition was the added pressure
on recording artists to increase the scope
and length of their tours, adding performances
to mitigate the losses resulting
from the steep drop in album sales.
Musicians faced the same challenge that
exhibitors have dealt with for generations:
how to sustain an industry amid the rise
of new home-entertainment technologies.
Concerts sought to reconnect the public
with the excitement and spectacle of live
music.
The top five highest-grossing concert
films of all time have been released over
the past six years. The time frame directly
aligns with the recession and postrecession
era that followed the 2008 financial
crash. The economic turmoil left families
with a decrease in disposable income as
the global economy struggled to reassert
itself. A family outing to the closest venue
for a big concert suddenly had the potential
to become a burdensome expense.
High ticket prices, transportation costs,
parking, concessions, and merchandise
could easily turn a family night out into
an evening costing upward of $500.
Postrecession America has provided
the perfect circumstances for concert
films to find an audience. Families with
children too young to attend live concerts
and those who find it too expensive to
attend the events can now enjoy a similar
level of a concert’s excitement and spectacle
at a fraction of the cost in their local
movie theaters.
This isn’t to imply that ticket sales
for concerts have dipped since 2008, nor
that concert films have in any way begun to supplant live music events.
Concert movies have instead become a viable alternative for family entertainment
and, for the first time in box office history, a potential source of
significant profit for exhibitors, distributors, artists, and audiences.
Pop idols were born as soon as teenagers became a demographic of
consumers with enough buying power to bring in profit for any company.
If these artists could sell records, the assumption was that they could sell
movies as well. The rise of the teenage consumer occurred throughout
TOP-GROSSING CONCERT FILMS
OF ALL TIME
ARTIST
Justin Bieber:
Never Say Never
This Is It
Michael Jackson
Hannah Montana &
Miley Cyrus: Best of
Both Worlds Concert
the 1950s, a period coinciding with the popular emergence of television
and during the height of Hollywood’s studio system. This was a period
when studios were in the business of making movies with a streamlined
efficiency; studios had their own backlots, stables of screenwriters, and an
ever-rotating talent pool of actors and directors on exclusive contracts. It
didn’t really matter if Elvis could act or not, there was already a team on
salary employed by the studio that could mold a project around the star.
These star vehicles saw minor changes as the film industry went
through its own transformation over the subsequent years. The generations
that followed came with their share of recording artists who
attempted a transition to the silver screen. There are too many failures in
this category to list, but Britney Spears’ star turn on Crossroads comes
to mind. The road-trip movie grossed just $37.2 million at the box
office, and Spears hasn’t starred in another
Domestic
Gross
$73,013,910
$72,091,016
$65,281,781
Katy Perry: Part of Me $25,326,071
Jonas Brothers:
The 3D Concert
Experience
Madonna:
Truth or Dare
Glee: The 3D
Concert Movie
$19,162,740
$15,012,935
$11,862,398
U2 3D $10,363,341
U2: Rattle and Hum $8,600,823
Shine a Light
Rolling Stones
SOURCE: BOXOFFICE.COM
$5,505,267
movie since. There have also been a good
number of success stories from artists like
Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Cher,
Will Smith, and Mark Wahlberg—all of
whom have built respectable film careers
for themselves. The most striking recent
example comes with ’N Sync’s Justin
Timberlake, who has spent the better part
of the last decade on acting projects in
addition to his solo pop career.
If the Spice Girls were formed in
today’s media market, one has to wonder
if something like Spice World would
still get made. Pop stars have turned a
corner thanks to the newfound box office
viability of concert films; if the public
loves to see these artists sing, does that
mean they’re just as interested in seeing
them act? A great Spice Girls concert
can be a fun experience, even within a
kitsch context, but a Spice Girls film
can’t guarantee a good shelf life beyond
a cult appreciation. Today’s concert films
cut out the middleman of a screenwriter
and rid themselves from the constraints
of narrative cinema to give audiences a
simpler product: pop stars doing what
they do best.
Concert films are equally as enticing
for producers and artists themselves. The
entire shoot can be incorporated into an
existing tour, requiring little extra effort
or time from stars. No script development,
no creative differences with directors,
no time editing around a dramatic
performance that doesn’t work on screen.
The film’s theatrical release becomes a
de facto global tour for recording artists
without requiring any additional nights
inside of a tour bus. The concert film has
therefore become ingrained into a band’s
marketing strategy. Morgan Spurlock, the
documentary filmmaker of the product-placement satire The Greatest
Movie Ever Sold, knows a thing or two about today’s nebulous line
between a feature film and a marketing campaign. He is also the director
and one of the producers of this summer’s biggest concert movie, One
Direction: This Is Us.
The success of recent music documentaries owes a lot to the rise of
reality television as well. Live music had been a staple of network TV for
years before the introduction of MTV shifted recording artists to cable
AUGUST 2013 BoxOffice ® Pro The Business of Movies 43