DON’T YOU … WANT TO … KILL THE FANTA GIRLS

Ads before the previews at the movies have become ridiculous. With 10-15 minutes of coming attractions already playing before the film you actually paid to see, 5-10 minutes of TV-style commercials seem to do nothing but annoy audiences anymore. I know that I have decided to try to specifically not purchase anything sold to me incessantly. (So, Est&#233e Lauder, screw you!) And the problem is, if you go to any movie theater regularly, you will see the same ads over-and-over-and-over again. You must now decide to balance getting there early enough to get the desired seat against walking in right around the scheduled start time (since most theaters seem to try to start the ads a few minutes before) just to miss that funny-once-not-twice AMEX Blue “The world is filled with beautiful things” spot or the never-funny-and-always-irritating Fanta commercial. (Yeah, I’m focusing on you Loews, but don’t feel to comfortable Regal or AMC. You’re just as bad.)

While I would tend to agree with the Movie Marketing Blog that these people have come a bit too late, apparently an organization (or at least a web site) calling itself The Captive Motion Picture Audience of America (or CMPAA because even if initials don’t provide for proper acronyms, they still, you know … lend legitimacy, even when mimicking illegitimate organizations) has decided to fight the power and attempt to convince the major theater owners to stop showing these commercials before the other commercials, i.e., previews. (Thanks Cinema Minima!)

Of course, this will never happen. Theater owners don’t make their money from box office sales; they make it from concessions and now the very lucrative revenue stream of TV-style commercials ranging from makeup to soft-drinks to specials on cable channels that may have already aired but obviously had to be booked for the whole month. Generally, a distributor will retain 75-80% of a film’s box office take (sometimes more) for the opening week(s), and the theater itself keeps the rest. The longer a film plays, the greater the percentage of ticket sales go to the theaters, but especially in today’s marketplace, the chance of a theater getting to even a 50-50 split on the take of a particular film are slim because the scale doesn’t reach that point for weeks or months, and by the time it does, the grosses aren’t that high anyway. With a film like Spider-Man 2, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony Pictures struck a deal to keep 90% of all ticket sales, meaning even with the exorbitant $10+ ticket prices in Manhattan, your local Loews is actually only keeping $1 and change. That’s why your concessions snack is $25!

So more power to you CMPAA, but don’t expend too much energy because unless you decide to boycott movies altogether and convince the rest of this blockbuster-loving public to do so, nothing’s going to change. But while you’re at it, do you think you could turn your attention to the studios and convince them that overexposure of film trailers is counterproductive. There comes a point when I can’t wait for a film to open, not because I’m excited to see it, but because I can’t take seeing the damn trailer anymore regardless of how excited I may be for the actual movie. Spider-Man 2 is the exception: the preview running now is exceptional, and regardless of how the movie is, I never tire of it. But The Stepford Wives preview killed me. And I can’t go to a movie now without seeing a bunch of CGI chase Will Smith in I, Robot, a trailer which has already been running for what seems like months, and the movie is still three weeks away. Paramount has already started to bombard us with previews for Jonathan Demme‘s new treatment of The Manchurian Candidate . Great director, great cast, and it looks like an interesting post-Cold War re-imagination of the story with major differences from John Frankenheimer‘s brilliant 1962 original. But it doesn’t open for over a month (July 30), and I’ve already been seeing teasers and now a full trailer for a while. So leave us alone … just a little bit. I know Paramount needs a hit and all, but do they have to place the preview before everything? Yeah, I understand the concept of advertising, but tease us, don’t torture us. That’s what the Fanta girls are for.