gives suggestions for future research
638: some statistics about size of film industry
640: “no major American industry ever operated with so little research of its market as did the motion picture industry during the period of its greatest influence, from its early years until the mid-1950s.”

PRODUCTION

The Success Rate of the Traditional “Green-Lighting” Process Can be Improved
641: “type II error”
“Type I errors, which involve rejecting a potentially successful project”

Studios Will Increasingly Pursue “Hit Franchises” Based on Established Intellectual Properties in an Effort to Reduce Risks
642: “In 2003, a major studio movie required nearly $64 million in production (“negative”) costs and another $40 million for prints and advertising costs”
“Managing increased costs with fewer potential investors has created a serious funding problem for major studios and independents alike.”
“It is increasingly important that the establishment of a movie franchise also seems advantageous in the home video window—sequels appear to have particularly strong DVD sales—and in ancillary windows such as video games and merchandising.”
643: “Studios’ eagerness to produce movie sequels, remakes, and movies based on properties established in other media—such as musicals, books, comics, old TV programs, and video games—is likely to continue.”

More Effective Portfolio Management Strategies Will Help Studios to Better Balance Risks and Returns
643: “2004d). Other portfolio dimensions include original versus familiar concepts (e.g., remakes and sequels), low versus high budget, in-house financing versus co-financing, track-record talent versus new creative talent, and acquisition versus in-house development.”
“co-financing helps soften release competition, particularly for high-budget movies.”

Conventional Contractual Arrangements with Talent Will Come Under Pressure
644: “Ravid (1999) finds no correlation between star participation and film revenues or profitability, which is consistent with the view that stars capture their “economic rent.”"

The Benefits of Digital Technology Will Change the Production Process but Not Lead to Fundamental Shifts in Power Structures
646: “”I can safely say that I’ll never shoot another fllm on film” (George Lucas)

THEATRICAL DISTRIBUTION

Box-Office Performance Will Increasingly Depend on a Small Number of Blockbusters
647: “Is blockbuster an ex-post or an ex-ante construct?”

Distributors Will Continue to Rely on High Advertising Budgets in Releasing Their Films, But Will Allocate Those Budgets Differently and More Evenly Across Media Vehicles
648: “overall spending on advertising by the studios and major independents was nearly $3.3 billion in 2003″
“all found evidence for a positive relationship between advertising and weekly or cumulative revenues.”
“the positive relationship between advertising expenditures and opening-week revenues is largely due to a second positive correlation between advertising expenditures and the screens allocated to a movie in its opening-week.”
“Television advertising, in particular in network TV, is the largest investment—it accounts for nearly 40% of total advertising budgets for new releases.”

Distributors’ Theatrical Release Timing Will Become an Increasingly Important Strategic Decision
649: “He finds that observed release patterns are closely aligned to observed patterns in sales, but not to the underlying demand. This implies that distributors could significantly increase their revenues by pushing some of their high-season releases to low-season dates.”
650: “Opportunities to save interest on investments, prevent piracy from cannibalizing revenues, and capitalize on the buzz that a movie has generated in the United States, all push distributors toward a simultaneous release strategy. But such practical considerations as the time it takes to subtitle the movie, the cost of additional prints, and the chance to learn from the U.S. performance and adjust marketing strategies for releases in other countries, all push distributors toward a sequential release strategy.”
“the time lag between releases moderates this relationship, which suggests that the buzz generated in the U.S. market may quickly wear out.”

Distributors Will Benefit from Shortening the Time between Theatrical and Nontheatrical Windows—But They Are Walking a Fine Line
650: “DVDs, which have become the largest revenue window, accounting for roughly $20 billion in 2003 – twice what is spent on U.S. theatrical tickets (Standard
& Poor’s 2004). In fact, it is widely believed that most movies do not break even until they are released on DVD.”
“Films are normally first distributed to the market that generates the highest revenues over the least amount of time. They then “cascade” in order of revenue contribution down to markets that return the lowest revenues per unit time. Historically, that has meant that theatrical release was followed by pay-cable programming, home video, network television, and finally local television syndication. But DVDs are capable of generating higher revenue than theatrical tickets over less time, as are other new technologies such as Pay Per View (PPV) and Video On Demand (VOD).”
651: “Focusing on the cable television industry, Chipty (2001) finds that [vertical] integration tends to exclude rivals but does not harm, and may actually benefit, consumers because of the associated efficiency gains.”
“How much do they value the social aspect of movie consumption?”
“Given that going to the theater is a different social experience than watching a movie at home, intense concerns about the substitutability of the theatrical window seems misplaced.”
“domestic theatrical releases have become “loss leaders” for a stream of other products that earn the lion’s share of revenues.”

The Benefits of Digital Technology Will Continue to Outweigh the Costs for Distributors—At Least for the Foreseeable Future
651: “piracy is widely regarded as the key threat to movie distributors’ business models.” But not to film itself!
“There is evidence that piracy is not the significant threat the entertainment industry believes it to be.”
652: “It is not known whether a dollar lost to piracy is one the distributors could have collected, e.g., in theater tickets or DVD sales.”
“How can the impact of movie piracy be quantified? How does it affect production and innovation?”
“Consumers, they fear, might perceive high-quality copies made directly from a digital version (e.g., a DVD screener) to be particularly good substitutes for legitimate DVDs. However, to our knowledge, there is not yet any empirical evidence for this view.”

EXHIBITION

652: “Practitioners consider the theatrical performance of a movie in the United States to be a critical driver of its success in subsequent release windows.”
“theater attendance in 2003 is at record levels in the United States and overseas.”

Is the U.S. Theatrical Motion Picture Market Still Overscreened?
653: “Many industry insiders have argued that, during the 1990s, and possibly later, the U.S. market has been “overscreened,” i.e., that the number of theater screens was too high for the number of movie-goers, their movie-going frequency, and the supply of movies. Some statistics support this hypothesis.”
“The exhibition industry responded by lowering the number of screens from its peak of 37,396 in 2000 to 36,764 in 2001,35,280 in 2002, and 35,786 in 2003.”
“His results suggest that theaters are often local monopolists, and that “business-stealing effects” across theaters are small and decrease significantly with distance, and that theaters are likely to underprovide movie screens relative to a socially optimal number.”
“One rule of thumb used in the industry is that when the estimated movie-going frequency is 5.5 movies per year per person, one screen for every 10,000 people is needed.”
“What determines the optimal level of screens? How will it be affected by changes in home consumption of movies and other leisure activities?”

The Exhibition Market Will Become More Concentrated, More Integrated (Through Mergers and Acquisitions), and New (More Sophisticated) Players Will Emerge

The Contractual Arrangements Between Distributors and Exhibitors Are Inefficient and Will Change—So Will Admission Pricing Strategies
654: “It has two components: an after house allowance (“nut”) split, and a guaranteed minimum (“floor”).”
“The exhibitor’s key power bases appear to be the total number of screens it owns, their location, and the relative shortage (or surplus) of screens available at the time, while the distributor’s key power bases appear to be the expected success of the particular movie and the amount of promotional support the distributor is willing to commit.”
655: “What is an “event” movie, and what sort of unique strategic considerations does it deserve?”

Exhibitors Seeking to Effectively Manage Their Business Will Face a Highly Complex Strategic Space
656: “variables such as movie attributes and advertising expenditures, typically assumed to influence audiences directly, mostly do so indirectly, through their impact on exhibitors’ screen allocations.”
“They showed that the exhibitor could have increased the theater’s profitability nearly 40% by running fewer movies for longer periods, and could have increased the facility’s profitability by over 120% by procuring movies from a larger set of movies running elsewhere in the country.”
“MOVIEMOD, is designed to generate box-office forecasts and to support the strategic release decisions (number and type of screens as well as advertising) for a new movie after the movie has been produced, but before its national release.”
“We can distinguish two different behavioral processes: (1) movie-first-theater-second, and (2) theater-flrst-movie-second. Theater circuits have begun efforts to induce more consumers to adopt the theater-first-movie-second heuristic.”
657: “How can movies’ attendance best be understood as a collective decision-making process?”
“What role do layout, design, and atmospheric marketing play on consumers’ enjoyment of the theatrical experience?”

The Costs of Digital Technology Will Continue to Outweigh the Benefits for Exhibitors—At Least for the Foreseeable Future

CONCLUSION

657f: “we believe that research on consumer movie-going behavior is critical in addressing many of our proposed research directions”
658: “What is the nature of the power structure in the industry? How has it changed over time? What are its key determinants? What role will each player have in the future? How can media conglomerates best manage their motion picture assets and businesses? How can they find synergies with other assets? Knowledge of these “bigger-picture” issues will not only be interesting in its own right, but will also help frame potential studies on the managerial issues we discuss.”
“Technological advances emerge as an important driver of the research avenues that we propose. Technology has always played a major role in the evolution
of the motion picture industry but today—more than in the past—technological developments seem to be integral to all stages of the value chain.”
“The digital age has just begun, and its ultimate effects on film production, theatrical distribution, and exhibition, and nontheatrical media such as television, video, the Internet, and mobile devices remain largely unknown. It therefore seems wise to take a broad research perspective on the motion picture industry.”
“Consumer behavior within the domain of motion pictures (in all their formats) is critical for the development of new metrics”

Talks about the filmic experience. In a sense, the approach is similar to mine from confirmation where I re-appropriated the term cinema experience.

65
“It is clear that cinema, in widening its definition, risks losing its specificity.”

66
“This is why I would argue that filmic experience will survive: in order to allow the spectator of media to be involved in a truly exploratory way, in order to force eyes and ears to be opened as they are nowhere else.”

They built SilverScreener in cooperation with Pathé. It’s an evolutionary decision support system (DSS) for the motion picture industry.
They designed it in several steps: they started small (1 screen) and made it bigger with time (multi-screen and then lots of side constraints).
They stress the importance of gaining the trust of the management and of not overwhelming them straight away.

1
It “was designed to assist exhibition executives in movie scheduling.”

Describes the history of change in Hollywood?

2
“the business of entertainment is often not considered serious business by economists and other proponents of an information age.”
“On the other hand, technological components or economic characteristics of entertainment are less important to many media scholars or cultural analysts, who are more interested in studying entertainment products as texts or measuring audiences or the effects of entertainment messages, thus missing the possible connections to fundamental components of this (supposedly) new technological era.”

4
Hollywood has a reputation of being technologically backward.

6
“this book will present a political economic analysis of Hollywood and the latest technologies.”
“Chapter 2 will consider historical treatments of Hollywood and technology, with a brief discussion of specific periods of technological development in film history.
Chapter 3 presents an overview of some of the technological developments in the production of motion pictures, while
chapter 4 details the activities of the dominant Hollywood corporations that link film production with distribution.
Major outlets for the distribution of Hollywood products are considered in the following chapters:
cable (chapter 5),
home video (chapter 6),
and theatrical exhibition (chapter 7).
Hollywood’s marketing and merchandising strategies are detailed in chapter 8,
while global activities are outlined in chapter 9.
Based on these discussions, conclusions will be offered in chapter 10.”

18
“Studying film for film’s sake – A good portion of the academic study of film typically has been insular and self-contained, with little regard to interrelationships between media or media and social context.” She references Thomas H. Guback, 1978, Are we looking at the right things in films?; paper from society for cinema studies conference, philadelpia, penn.

245
“the potential of video, cable and satellite technologies have been developed with profit, rather than expanded communication and/or enlightenment, in mind. In other words, the film industry’s primary motivation has to do with profits, not necessarily with film.”

246
“the dominant use of these new media forms [the ones she talks about throughout the book: VHS, cable, satellite, laser disc, etc.] is entertainment. No, nothing against a good laugh, a good cry, a mindless romp through outer space. The point, again, is that we were promised so much more.”

249-252
3 myths were introduced in chapter 1: the information age (as any other new technology/age before it) promises to bring along

1. more competition -> indies will get their chance
2. industrial conflict -> there is still such a thing as a ‘film industry’
3. more diversity -> more kinds of content will be created

This book showed that all 3 myths are untrue. Hollywood is as dominant es ever. Hollywood is an integrated business, they are not ‘just’ filmmakers. We experience ‘recycled culture’; more outlets simply reair the same existing content.

250f
“Indeed, there are differences in the essences of these various media, as Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis showed us in their work.
Yet these differences are breaking down and it might behoove us to think in terms of transindustrial activities, emphasizing the overlapping strategies of a relatively few corporations producing and distributing entertainment and cultural products. Again, we might also revisit the notion of a culture industry, as depicted by the Frankfurt School theorists in the 1930s.”
=> chapter transmedia lit review, from an industrial (not content) perspective.

254
“It remains to be seen if the public will ever be offered anything really new or challenging from future technological developments or other industrial changes. But it also remains to be seen how the public ultimately will respond.” => new things HAVE come (The Beast), the public IS responding, EA hopes to unify these two.

00:35
“What I mean by that [storyworld] is I want to create experiences that allow the audiences to step into the shoes of the protagonist. I want the story itself to model itself more in the way that people are actually consuming their entertainment and media these days. So my work is a fusion of film, gaming, and technology.”

05:45
“And that’s what we try to do when we create storyworlds. It’s about texture. It’s about putting people in the shoes of the protagonist. And it’s about letting them feel something that they wouldn’t normally feel through just a passive film.

Lance describes the order of events in the remixed version of Head Trauma. He talks about how he remixed Head Trauma, added ARG and many other live elements. He calls this “cinema ARG”. But I’m not sure if he mentions the term here.

Then he talks about how the language of storytelling is all new. Of course, certain fundamentals are going to stay the same – like the idea of conflict, for example. But the language of how everything is done is changing A LOT at the moment.

10
“Sophisticated new technology always seems to provoke a flurry of wild and naive speculation about its effects.”

11f
“The technology alone does not create the use to which it is put: technology is implemented (or, as with most inventions, never implemented) according to the prevailing patterns of use into which it can be fitted, and according to the emerging forms of social organisation with which it can align itself.”

12
“TV lines up with (and inflects) the increasing domestic use of technology, the emphasis on home and family as site of consumption; cinema lined up with (and superseded) public forms of entertainment like vaudeville and music hall, the sites of public enjoyment and of the development of non-religious mass ideologies.”

16
TV & newspapers feed off each other.

24f
“The form of the entertainment film is one reason for the confusion between cinema and broadcast TV. The entertainment film can be broadcast on TV, hence it seems as though there is little real difference between the two media. Two immediate objections can be made to this assumption. First, a film on TV yields a very different experience to its viewer, unless that viewer is able to suspend the sense of watching TV and imagine instead the sense of being in a cinema. Second, it is not possible to show broadcast TV material in a cinema in the way that it is possible to show films on TV. Broadcast TV has developed its own forms, those of the serial and the series, which resist showing in the ‘single work’ form that cinema imposes.”

25f
“Cinema marketing sells two rather distinct things: the single film in its uniqueness and its similarity to other films; and the experience of cinema itself. Cinema and film are both sold at the same point, at the point of sale of an admission ticket. It is not the film that is sold at this point, it is the possibility of viewing a film or films; it is not cinema as an object that is sold, but cinema as an anticipated experience.”

26
“tickets are sold [...] on the expectation of pleasure.”
“What is bought in the cinema is the possibility of a pleasurable performance: the performance of a particular film and the performance of cinema itself, both together.”

26f
“Cinema in this way becomes a very precise urban experience, that of the crowd with its sense of belonging and of loneliness. Alternatively, cinema in smaller communities tends to perform a different function when most of the audience are acquainted with each other. Here the entertainment is related to particular characteristics of individuals or of the place itself. The film comes from outside, the cinema belongs to the particular place. However, such group experiences of cinema are becoming more and more rare, and cinema is now characteristically an urban phenomenon, [especially in Britain].”

27
“‘picture palaces’ [are] now the subject of nostalgic photo-books: simple brick shells decorated in bizarre and rich styles, and usually of a massive size to emphasise the grandeur of the cinematic experience.”

28
1920s: “The couple visiting the cinema during this period experienced cinema as an integrated succession of entertainments that went far beyond the simple experience of viewing a film together in a more or less anonymous crowd.”

30
“An idea of the film is widely circulated and promoted, an idea which can be called the ‘narrative image’ of the film, the cinema industry’s anticipatory reply to the question ‘What is this film like?’” => The narrative image is the promise -> the film is the realisation of that promise.
“Payment for a ticket is not an endorsement of a film, nor is it an endorsement of a particular performance of a film in a particular place. It is an endorsement of the narrative image of the film, together with the general sense of the cinematic experience.”
“Cinema demands single films, complete in themselves and distinct from other films.”

37
“The experience offered is one in which an individual film will complete the enigma of the narrative image. The experience of cinema that is offered is one of the public viewing of images with their supporting sounds. These images and sounds, viewed in the particular circumstances of the cinema, produce a particular kind of spectating that is intense and sustained.” Is this any different from TV / home cinema nowadays?

38-61
Ellis uses psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between cinema & viewer? Interesting, but I don’t agree.

38
Cinema is constructed in another time & place => absent from the place in which the viewing takes place => yet it is (very) present.

40
“Commercial cinema, in increasing its scale and scope as far as possible, tries to standardise its audiences to the same kinds of attention to the screen.”
In cinema everybody is alone and in near-darkness => particular kind of mental state: “a concentration of psychic activity into a state of hyper-receptivity”: dream-like, close to sleep => “what is seen is not subject to the usual expectations of plausibility that we apply to everyday life.”

41f
Cinema provokes identification with:

1. apparatus of projection (beam of light from projector = imagined beam of light from spectators’ eyes),
2. narcissistic identification with any figure on screen.

42
“[the] partial suspension of the judging function of the ego [is] necessary for the activities of day-dreaming and the construction of fantasies.” The ghost and the shell are not unified anymore -> one looks at oneself from the outside.

43
“Both dreaming and fantasy deal with fragmented and contradictory representations of figures” (oneself)

45
The spectator is looking at something that doesn’t look back at him = voyeurism.

47
Voyeurism is what constitutes the pleasure & fascination with cinema. I don’t agree, it’s about story.

50
“Gazing is the constitutive activity of cinema. Broadcast TV demands a rather different kind of looking: that of the glance. Gazing at the TV is a sign of intensity of attention that is usually considered slightly inappropriate to the medium.”
“As the conventions for the depiction of reality change, so audiences tend to deride what once was taken as ‘the real’ as being spectacular or a fake.” Perhaps why I don’t like classic films that much?

51
“entertainment cinema has been concerned [...] to play between the [spectacle and reality], to make the real spectacular and the spectacle plausible.”

53
“The cinema image is routinely more elaborate and detailed than the TV image.”

Cuban, M ~ Sports Ratings Records (31.10.2009)

Welt ~ Die Deutschen haben weniger Lust auf Kino (01.10.2009)

Film is NOT recession proof.

Neither is Broadway.

Hofler, R ~ Showbiz not always recession proof (10.08.2009)