Mike Boone
Supporting Actor
Billy Batson said:
You made a very important point, IMO, when you said "A film opens in all cinemas from day one, & you know if it's going to be a hit or not after two days." I'm old enough to have experienced the time when the movie studios used to release major films much less widely than today, opening many movies first in major cities, before gradually adding more theater engagements, with movies sometimes not reaching smaller cities and towns until months after their initial release. An exception to that kind of movie marketing, however, was the James Bond series, the films of which, always seemed to open everywhere. But the more gradual kind of release pattern, common in the 1960s, made a movie release seriously vulnerable to being destroyed by bad word of mouth, a risk that today's studios don't want to take. Today, the studios have to worry about the absurd amounts of money invested in even run of the mill films like the sci-fi movie Tomorrowland, which cost about 180 million dollars. Contrast that with 1957's Bridge on the River Kwai which cost 2 to 3 million, even with the bridge taking months to build. 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid cost $5 million, and even a large production like 1972's The Godfather cost just $6.5 million. (BTW, The Godfather initially opened in only 5 theaters!! I guess Paramount had little fear of bad word of mouth with that one.)
These days, by releasing movies on thousands of screens at once, the studios succeed in greatly minimizing the damage that negative word of mouth could do to their huge investments, because Monday morning when folks in a company's break room are talking about how bad the weekend's new movie release was, it's already too late to warn a lot of people about the stinker, because more than half of the office's regular movie goers probably just paid their admission over the weekend.
