Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Heart of US Theatrical Business meet Stake. Stake Meet Heart of US Theatrical Business.

An international group of researchers made a study of the value of shrinking or changing the windows on a movie's theatrical, DVD rental, DVD sell-thru and VoD releases.

What they found was quite interesting.

Now I'm not saying this is going to happen, but when you're talking 16% increases in revenue of a movie's life, then the studios are going to look at their release windows more closely. Everyone was assuming that releasing the DVD simultaneously with the theatrical would harm both releases, but it looks like Mark Cuban and Steven Soderbergh were right.

Another interesting aspect to the study is that in other countries the different release patterns would yield different results. This leads to the conclusion that different cultures devour their content in different ways (something to think about when dealing with the international marketplace).

1 comment:

jimhenshaw said...

Simultaneous theatrical release, DVD release, HD broadcast and online download just makes so much sense. I read a post on either Mark Cuban's blog or the site for 2929 Productions that indicated by providing theatre owners a cut of DVD sales on the simultaneous release of "Bubble", those owners made more money than they had on the run of "Mission Impossible III".

A single marketing campaign instead of several and building relationships with distribution partners by sharing revenue both open up the market to filmmakers with smaller promotional budgets and riskier films.

It's also great for the audience. Most people only see a movie once. If they want to see "Zodiac", but can't get a babysitter, why should they have to wait months for the experience.

I'll tell you one thing, when this happens, you're going to see TV numbers take an even bigger hit, forcing broadcasters to offer more than they are now to hang onto their audiences.

Fierce competition and the audience in charge -- now that's my kinda world.