Movie Tracking..Not Working Anymore? (1 Viewer)

Movie marketing tracking is in the toilet. I know it’s been hit and miss for years, but now, it’s pretty much all bad. Over the last few months, I have been looking at it all — just as all the studios in town do — and the inaccuracy has been truly appalling. Last weekend, this weekend. Multiple weekends in a row. Who provides analysis? NRG, Box Office Analyst, and MarketCast, mainly.RelatedHollywood Marketing Firm Cimarron Group Shuttering After Three Decades & Failed...Let’s just look at the past two weekends: TWC’s YA adaptation, The Giver was predicted at $20M and ended up at $12M last weekend while Millennium/Lionsgate’s The Expendables 3 was tracking anywhere from $20M to $25M and came in at $15.8M.This weekend was just as bad. If I Stay was tracking in the low 20’s and will come in at $16.3M; Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For was tracking at anywhere between $16M to $19M and came in at $6.4M. When the Game Stands Tall was tracking between $10M and $11M and came in at $8.7M. Tracking companies are driving the studios into a hell of their own making.The studios pay millions of dollars a year for solid tracking information so they can figure out how to spend their media. Guess what? The tracking ain’t working. It isn’t reliable. It’s off by millions. So the studios are, basically, basing their media buys on pure crap info. Millions and millions more dollars are being flushed in media buys. Great news for shareholders, eh?And it’s affecting everything. Not only do tracking numbers affect how studios spend on marketing, but they are also looking at those numbers to help determine what kind of genre projects to greenlight. They are hiring directors and writers based on what looks likely to be successful.

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