Boxoffice - May 2016

EXHIBITOR PROFILE > SONNY GOURLEY, MARCUS THEATRES
In addition to $5 Tuesdays,
Marcus Theatres offers
other value pricing options:
$6 RealD 3D Tuesdays, $5
Student Thursdays, and
Young at Heart Fridays—
discounted tickets for
afternoon moviegoers 60
and over.
We’ve written about Marcus’s $5 Stimulus
Tuesday program, where $5 gets you a ticket,
popcorn, and soda. Have you seen an uptick
in any particular genre or types of titles on
those days?
You definitely see that there are customers out
there, loyal moviegoers, who take advantage of the
Tuesday movie bargain. We haven’t necessarily seen
a change in any individual movie—they’ll come out
to see any genre, especially family films, on that day.
I think it’s something that allows customers to get in
the habit of going to the movies.
Event cinema has really grown from an
alternative to a viable programming option,
particularly on weekdays. Are there any
specific strategies you look at when it comes
to programming it?
We’re playing more content now than we ever
have, and I’m sure that’s not just at Marcus—people
at other circuits would say the same thing. This part of
the business has really taken off, led by the Met Opera,
and there are other players that are also doing well and
filling a void during the week. We’re glad to have it;
it’s all about increasing attendance and getting more
people interested in coming to the cinema. We’ve done
a great job here at Marcus thanks to my colleague
[Marcus CEO] Rolando [Rodriguez] in increasing our
attendance every year, not only in having more people
come to the movies but having them come more often.
That’s something you can see through our loyalty program:
an attendance-driven approach where we want
to have people come to our theaters habitually.
With more content, more movies, being made
available, how do you approach independent
titles that might not have the same marketing
muscle behind them as a studio release?
There’s obviously a big audience of baby boomers
out there that is starting to look at the Oscar season as
early as September. As we see movies pick up awards,
we try to get them in as many of our mainstream cinemas
as quickly as possible to develop that audience.
It’s not just the Oscar season, but that’s primarily when
we have baby boomers looking for different types of
movies to come see. Our goal is to bring those movies
to the suburbs and promote them
to allow enough capacity for these
movies so people can get accustomed
to seeing more independent
product. It’s a big goal for us, to
get these runs out to our mainstream
cinemas as early as possible.
And it’s working out very well;
there’s a big audience out there for
independent film outside of just
the Oscar season.
What have been some of
the biggest surprises you’ve
seen at the box office in the last couple of
years?
Nobody last year thought Jurassic World would
make $208 million in its opening weekend, and then
to follow that up with Star Wars: The Force Awakens—
we all knew it was going to do great, but a $248 million
opening weekend is something we never dreamed
of. My favorite part of the business is forecasting,
trying to figure out what these movies are going to do,
and I love the fact that this business is so unpredictable.
Deadpool is another recent example. Nobody had
that movie opening anywhere near $150 million for
the four-day opening weekend, and sure enough it hit
a nerve with customers and just exploded. It’s amazing
how social media can sell a movie that people like really
quickly, but if a movie isn’t so good it can really hurt
that movie that first weekend. The word spreads in a
hurry. You used to be able to sell a movie for a week
or two, but nowadays the quality of a movie stands on
its own and the customers tell you right away if they’re
interested or not.
Genres tend to be cyclical in popularity. What
type of film is performing particularly well
today?
The most popular movies right now are comic
book adaptations, Marvels and DC. I would also say
that animated family movies continue to be very well
received. The smaller movies, like romantic comedies
that aren’t dependent on special effects—those can
present challenges. If they don’t get Oscar recognition,
it becomes tougher for the studios to get them
recognition and marketed out to the mainstream.
Nowadays the other big trend is that movies are made
for global audiences, so something like a comedy,
with humor that we would only get here in the U.S.,
that presents a challenge for the studios.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came out
almost 15 years ago—a foreign art-house
genre movie that ended up selling out
theaters at suburban malls. Since then,
however, we have seen very few foreign films
with that level of success in North America.
Do you think that will change as audience
demographics in the U.S. change, or is it
34 BoxOffice ® MAY 2016