Fixing The Disconnect

I have had a lot of conversations this week. One booker that I spoke to told me he was afraid that this fall would see the closure of a lot of independent theaters, another conversation was with a theater owner who truly believed we were in a cycle and the cycle would adjust itself. I look at the back and forth of Cineworld/Regal, and I start to look at the human impact as a result of the egoism that resulted in the collapsing of this circuit.

?As well this week, I presented at the Maple Theater for their Secret Cinema in the north suburbs of Detroit, the Orson Welles classic “A Touch of Evil”. I did just an ok job but what impressed me is that on a Thursday night, over 100 people showed up and were more than engaged. The largest demographic in the audience were seniors, and they were keen, engaged, and passionate about their movie-going. It is a moment in movie-going that kind of haunts me, a moment that tells me that movie-going is still viable and is still vibrant, but there is something wrong.

?There exist on many fronts in this world of movies several points of disconnect.

One of the most glaring is the disconnect between these legions of would-be reviewers who have like a bunch of forlorn barnacles attached themselves to the body of cinema. They take the keyboard in hand and expound endlessly, either decimating a movie or praising it effusively. There are of course, some really sentient reviewers out there, but they are overwhelmed by the cadre of lemming-like typists who decided that they can falsely inflate their own ego by either piling on a wave of cinematic negativity or trumpeting a movie where they establish a perception that eventually can never be met.

?I used to rely on Roger Ebert for his opinions of movies in general. I felt that he had enough depth and MidWest common sense to objectively assess the merits of a movie. Today the internet is awash with so many opinions that just lack discipline in forming these opinions. Let me give you a couple of examples of this disconnect in action.

?“Red Notice”, starring The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot, premiered in November 2021 and received horrible and often cruel reviews from the body of online critics. But opposed to the critics, it received a 92 percent audience score. It had high viewership, garnered a couple of records in regards to viewership, and a sequel is in the works.

?The Gray Man is a $200-million Ryan Gosling-Chris Evans action movie that was released in July 2022. This movie saw a litany of horrible reviews but did manage, in spite of this torrent of negative reviews, to become the number one movie being streamed? in 91 countries.? What this is telling you is that, for the most part, reviewers are starting to be ignored. Audiences are beginning to discern good and bad within their own body of opinion. A boycott of reviewers has taken hold for streaming, and I believe shortly will emerge in theatrical movie going. It is regrettable because, at one time, a good reviewer could contribute mightily to the excitement around a good movie. Now we are dealing with braying seagulls who (there are exceptions) make up the body of modern reviewers.

?Hollywood in 1997, started looking at success and failure as a mathematical exercises. Soon educational institutions began to look at box office predictions. Researchers from Oxford University and The Central University of Budapest started analyzing movies released in 2009 and 2010. They looked at 300 plus movies and used these movies' popularity on Wikipedia as a baseline taking into account the number of page views, the number of Wikipedia editors contributing to the article about the movies, and the diversity of these editors.

?They claimed the mathematical algorithm that they made allowed them to predict box office revenues with an accuracy of 77%.? They claimed that their predictive model was the best; previous models could only predict up to 59% accuracy. They could predict the box office takings of six out of 312 films with 99% accuracy where the predicted value was within 1% of the real value. Some 23 movies were predicted with 90% accuracy and 70 movies with an accuracy of 70% and above.

?The model was quickly adopted by the boyars in Hollywood and while the model worked for tentpole movies or with movies that were to be made by a marquee director/actor, the model failed when it came to lowering budget or movies that were not as initially well known.? This kind of thinking and the application of this form of toolset created another disconnect, relying on the arbitrary insertion of math into marketing efforts and pre-defining success and failure. This thinking has reduced the diversity of products, therefore reducing the diversity of the audience, ignoring the need for a compelling product for rural and second-level markets and the ability to innovate. This way of thinking promotes the replication of success but not the creation of success.?

When VHS technology was placed into the market, many said this would kill the movie-going experience. It did not because there was a natural ecosystem that flowed from the movie screen. Four to six months later, the movie would show up on the shelf of a video rental community. People were excited about the movies and saw that this new technology would create momentum by using the theatrical experience to market movies for a VHS release. One market flowed into another. Now we have many points of disconnected approaches being put forward by studios, which create, again, massive disconnects away from the potential audiences for both markets.

?It is time that this disconnected business of ours starts to heal, and we can get back to doing business in a thoughtful and connected manner with the only thing which should really count, our audiences.