Movie Make-out

Variety reports another development in the movie theater biz: Village Roadshow Ltd., Act III, Lambert Entertainment and the Retirement Systems of Alabama pension fund have joined up to give the US the new Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinemas. The $200 million endeavour plans to build 50 "luxury" theaters over the next five years, with the first two in Redmond, Washington, and South Barrington, Illinois — both very wealthy suburbs (of Seattle and Chicago, respectively, of course).

Each location will have around eight screens, each featuring 40 reclining armchairs with footrests and digital projection (with 3D capability). Each location — and this will really be the key in establishing and maintaining the "luxury" image — will also contain a lounge and bar featuring a full menu of cocktails and food (including appetizers and other "theater-friendly" foods like sushi), concierge service, valet parking… and because they serve booze, the theaters will also have an 18/21 age minimum (presumably dependent on local laws).

The ticket price? $35. Not including any food or drinks. That’s just the admission! 

Scoff all you want at the exorbitant ticket price (as AICN does), but this is not the first luxury theater chain: Regal Entertainment, Cinemark, National Amusements and Sundance Cinemas have "similar" luxury theaters, with "high-end food and concierges," albeit at much lower prices ($12–18). At $35, it’s really not about the movies; it’s about the atmosphere. Even if you don’t spend the money on a movie, each location is still basically a bar, and movie theaters always make more money from "concessions" than from ticket sales.

Yet if were a multi-millionaire, I would consider $35 for a comfortable seat, decent food, booze, and a lack of cell-phone slinging assholes — depending on the movie, of course. But the question is how many millionaire cinephiles are there, it’s… just how badly do the rich want to be isolate themselves from the poor? And we already know the answer to this: a lot.

However this pans out, I highly doubt that any of these luxury movie theaters will look like this.

Earlier this week, Regal announced that it will be adding 31 more IMAX screens to its roster, doubling its current stake in the big big screen by 2010. (Within the same time frame, "Regal will have 52 IMAX theaters (and) IMAX will have more than 300 running worldwide.")

The article also mentions that IMAX is "upping the number of studio pics it releases on its screens in the 2-D and 3-D formats. Its digital projection system will enable it to unspool up to 12 pics per year vs. the six it now plays annually."

Related posts: Around the Web: A new business model for movie theaters, an indie movie glut, more (updated), 2007 box office breaks a record, ticket sales flat; Monsters vs. Aliens to be first true 3D animated film (updated)

The New York Times has a really cool article about the woman who founded Film Streams, not-for-profit art house movie theater in Omaha, Nebraska. Rachel Jacobson, a 29 year old Omaha native,

said in an interview, [that] though there are certainly more of them being made nowadays — (the showing of small films) is not great business. “That’s why a nonprofit is the way to go,” she said. “Because that’s the only business plan that allows you to show good movies. The multiplexes have just taken over, especially in cities like this.”

Later in the article Jacobson says that they needed to sell about 30,000 tickets per year to "meet our expectations"; they’ve sold 30,000 since they opened on July 27, 2007. Not too shabby.

A recent Variety article discussed the huge growth in the "mid-budget" ($20–60 million) film. One very interesting chunk (and there’s much more to the article):

In 2002, about 450 films were released in the U.S. In 2007, the tally was about 600. "All of that growth is independent film," Glickman trumpeted.

But those 150 extra pics mean distribs are fighting for smaller pieces of the box office pie, and it’s gotten tougher and more expensive to grab moviegoers’ attention.

"We’d like to get the titles spread out better over the year," admits NATO prexy John Fithian. "If we didn’t have four blockbusters competing on the same weekend, the titles would spread out and the theaters would put in a smaller art picture and not keep eating each other’s lunch."

Update (3/17/08): The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that one of the largest movie theater chains in the country, Regal Entertainment Group, has decided to allow red-band (R-rated/restricted) trailers to play in its theaters, after an almost industry-wide moratorium on them following a damning 2000 FTC report. The chain had ruled them out for fear of offending customers and concerns that an R-rated trailer might accidentally get screened before a PG- or G-rated flick. (The widespread adoption of digital projection systems has apparently allayed this second concern.) Other major chains are expected to follow suit.

The good? R-rated comedies like Superbad and Pineapple Express will once again be able to show trailers that more accurately and effectively market their films. The bad? Those god damn horror movie trailers that plague me every time I see movies are probably going to get a whole lot worse.

Update (3/22/08): The New York Times has a kind of snapshot of the turbulent times in the movie theater business: "At Cineplexes, Sports, Opera, Maybe a Movie" by Brooks Barnes. Many of you regular movie-goers have already seen ads for the Metropolitan Opera, and I’ve covered the 3D phenomenon in other posts, but apparently tickets to a Mets simulcast sold out quickly enough to encourage the team to do more this summer.

As the article states, "Operators want people to think of theaters as vibrant, busy places. But when weekends account for 70 percent of movie ticket sales, multiplex parking lots spend a lot of time sitting empty." How theaters choose to cultivate their Mondays through Thursdays in the next few years is going to be interesting.…

Related post: 2007 box office breaks a record, ticket sales flat; Monsters vs. Aliens to be first true 3D animated film (updated)

Every now and then I’ll see or hear people complain about celebrity activists, as if it’s all empty rhetoric and self-serving posturing, which is troubling. In spite of all the stars who do come off like asses (some of the time), it seems to me that people dying to find some sort of perceived hypocrisy with every star really just want to believe that nothing good can be accomplished in the world, and their attitude is merely one of justifying the apathy they live their own lives by.

The New York Times has a great article about celebrity activism, largely about Natalie Portman’s involvement with FINCA, a microfinancing organization Portman for which serves as "ambassador." Portman states, "(It) seems totally nuts to me… that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can." And it is nuts, but when she makes millions per film for a few months of dedicated work and a few rounds of promotion, all to make two-hour entertainments; if, in her copious time off, she can help promote a worthwhile non-profit that’s trying to make a difference in third world countries or get a few people to switch to compact fluorescents, simply by being who she is, why should she not?

Another celebrity the article touches on is George Clooney, who was recently named the UN’s "messenger of peace" and is a co-founder of Not On Our Watch, with Brad Pitt, Matt Damn, Don Cheadle and Jerry Weintraub.

So much for avoiding stuff about the Watchmen movie…

The film’s official site has posted character photos (posters?) of the main cast for the adaptation of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons comic. The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), the Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), and Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson) — with the Owlship behind him. No Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) yet, but I suppose they’re saving that for a little further down the line, since he’s the flashiest of the characters.…

Despite my reservations about this project… I gotta admit, it’s looking good so far. Rorschach is perfect, of course, but we’ve seen him before. The Owlship is terrific. Silk Spectre is great. They’re a little different, but they work for a movie version. I’m not sold on Ozymandias or Nite Owl (my favorite character, and so the one I’m bound to be the most nitpicky about), but they’re not travesties, and, as with most movie super-hero costumes, they’ll probably look better in motion.

Wilson doesn’t look like he’s packing the weight that Nite Owl has in the "present-day," but there are two possibilities I can think of: screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse wrote it out, which would be understandable, but unfortunate; or, we’re seeing him in his prime, from earlier in the timeline, and he’ll have a fat suit (of sorts) for the present-day portions of the film. I suppose we’ll find out eventually.

Director Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation has embarked on its long, winding road through post-production and will be released one year from now, on March 6, 2009.

Related post: Tales of the Black Freighter… anime?

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men
Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood
Actress: Marion Cotillard for La Vie en Rose
Supporting Actor: Javier Bardem for No Country for Old Men
Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton for Michael Clayton

A complete list of winners can be found at the official Oscars website.

UPDATE: Here’s Marketa Irglova’s acceptance speech, for those who missed it, or who want to get a little misty all over again:

USA Today provides us with "the best of Jon Stewart" from last night’s ceremony. My favorite: "The Democrats do have an historic race going.… Normally, if you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty."

The Associated Press reports that last night’s telecast was the least-watched Oscar ceremony ever, with a 21.9 rating and a 33 share. This was 14% lower than the previous least-watched ceremony ever, which had 33 million viewers.

(NBC taken down the SNL "I Drink Your Milkshake" sketch I’d embedded above, so here it is at the NBC site.)

This isn’t about movies, but this fake commercial from Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live appearance — the first post-strike episode — is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time:

Removed from YouTube at NBC’s request; click over to NBC.com to see it.

While most of the press about the Oscars in the mainstream media are all about the glitz, speculation about who’s going to win, and how hard it must be for Jon Stewart and his fresh-off-the-picket-line writers to whip up a show in a week, there’s still the occasional story that isn’t basically a bunch of bullshit. Here are a few that are worth your time:

USA Today has an excellent article on how the Oscars, either through platform releases or home video, have changed the way "modest" (independent) films make money. The Hollywood Reporter has a shorter article, more specifically about this year’s nominees.

Reuters covers some of the oversights in this year’s Best Foreign Language Film category. One very surprising omission that the article names was the European Film Awards’ European Film 2007" (their Best Picture equivalent) and Golden Globe Best Foreign Film nominee 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; while I have not seen it, myself, it made so many critics’ best of 2007 lists that it seemed like a shoo-in for a nod, at least — yet it was nowhere to be found.

UPDATED (2/24): Make the "Oscar coverage with listening to"; NPR’s Morning Edition radio show gave us this run-down of the nominees for Best Dramatic Score from film music expert Andy Trudeau, whose pick for Best Score (Atonement) lines up with my own.

NPR and Wired have a pair of interesting pieces on the snubbing of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who was widely thought to be all but guaranteed a nomination for Best Dramatic Score, for his amazing soundtrack to There Will Be Blood, only to have it ruled ineligible, along with Eddie Vedder’s score for Into the Wild.

JoBlo also provides us with links to this year’s Best Original and Adapted Screenplay, which is very kind of them.

Related posts: Oscar-nominated shorts now available from iTunes,  Review: The Counterfeiters is the real deal, Review: 2008 Oscar-nominated Live Action Short Films, Review: 2008 Oscar-nominated Animated Short Films, Top 10 Favorite Films of 2007