The Word On Film

The following letter from the novelist Lee Zion was inspired by Rebecca McCadney's column,The Number 1 Movie in America: Everyone wants to see it, but is it any good?

I recently read the article "The Number 1 Movie in America," by Rebecca McCadney, and I wanted to add that it’s even worse than you thought, Rebecca. The problem comes, in part, because there are too many movie screens.

Huh? I know you might think it makes no sense, but bear with me.

As recently as 20 years ago, there weren’t a lot of movie screens, but the venues were larger. Examples of this include the late, lamented Cinema 21 and Mission Valley Circle theaters, both remnants of the old guard. These were single-screened seated 900 people each.

The Mission Valley Circle, then across the street from the Mission Valley Center mall, was torn down. Borders Books and other stores now occupy the site. Cinema 21 still stands, but it’s now a church lining Interstate 8.

There aren’t that many single-screen movie theaters left. Only one remains in the entire city of San Diego; there’s another in Chula Vista and another in Encinitas. Elsewhere, the single-screen theaters were replaced at first by small scale multiplexes, with two, four, maybe six screens. American Multi-Cinemas, now called AMC, pioneered this sort of theater in the early ’60s to combat the rise of television.

Interestingly enough, most of these are gone, too. The six-sceren UA Glasshouse is gone from Sports Arena Drive, as is the Mann Theater multiplex just down the street. A four-screen AMC theater tucked behind Fashion Valley Mall, in the northwest corner, was torn down, and where a six-screen theater once graced UTC, the Sports Chalet now stands. Other small multiplexers are now gone from Escondido and Chula Vista. A run-down eight-screen AMC theater somehow manages to survive in Encinitas.

In their place come the double-digit monstrosities. (I once heard someone describe such a theater as a "dodeca-plex." I wish I could remember where I heard it; I want to give credit to the proper source.) Mission Valley installed a 20-plex; Fashion Valley followed suit with an 18-plex. Horton Plaza expanded from seven screens to 14, to compete against a newly built Gaslamp 15 only a few blocks away It’s hard to escape the double-digit theaters – Otay Mesa has a 24-screen AMC theater, while a 16-screen, 3,200-seat theater is under construction in Escondido.

What this has done is caused a proliferation of movie screens. But the number of movies to show on these screens has actually declined. Think back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, when the major studies, like MGM, put out 30 or 40 films every year. Nowadays, a typical studio releases a dozen or so annually, while also releasing a handful of films from minor studios or other sources.

So, if there are fewer films, but more screens to put them on, there’s only one way for the film to make back its money for its producers. The new strategy is saturation booking – getting the same film on more and more screens. Thus, when a typical film opens, a person looking for the latest blockbuster is likely to find it at one multiplex "on four screens," at another one on "three screens," and in yet another being shown in PURE DIGITAL CINEMA on one screen, and conventionally on two others.

In such an environment, the film makes most of its money on an opening weekend, and can often drop precipitously from one week to the next. After all, there’s a finite number of ticket buyers, and if the flick appears on a larger number of screens, that only guarantees it will depart from theaters that much faster. That’s why the Powers That Be pay so much attention to movie grosses, even though "The Number One Movie in America" is meaningless in this context.

The only other way producers can make money in this context is repeat business. So films are endlessly hyped as the top grossing flick for that week – to entice potential moviegoers that the flick must be good, and therefore they must be missing out on something.

The people who make the movies lose nothing by doing this, except when their film isn’t the top movie for that week. Most moviegoers don’t tend to challenge the assumptions behind the Number One film in America, and the ones that do are unlikely to go see 2 Fast 2 Furious anyway.

There’s some good news in the middle of all this. Last year, an unknown flick burst out of nowhere and became The Film That Wouldn’t Die. The movie in question, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, started off small and stayed small – but it stayed. The film had little marketing behind it, but it developed strong word of mouth, and continued doing well wherever it played.

The film always hovered near the bottom of the LA Times’ list of Top Twenty grossing flicks for the week, but unlike most films on the list, which remained there for five weeks, six weeks and then dropped off, My Big Fat Greek Wedding stayed on the list for 20, 30 weeks and scored an impressive cumulative gross. At the end of 2002, when the studios released the list of top grossing films for the entire year, the Greek film was the fifth-largest grossing film of the year, beating out many blockbusters. This in the year of Spiderman and Star Wars II (the winner and the runner-up, respectively.)

As I write this, the movie ads trumpet Bad Boys II as the top movie in America. This, of course, will not last, and when the figures are tallied at the end of the year, expect some sleeper from an independent house – with no explosions to speak of – to trump the cumulative box office grosses of this and several other noisy blockbusters (The Hulk? League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?)

There are only a few ways to fight against this trend. First, go see the movies that aren’t likely to be named Number One any time soon, but deserve and audience, like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Spirited Away. Then tell all your buddies, make sure that these films get the exposure they deserve. That way, you can live with the satisfaction of knowing that you helped turn an underexposed little film into a runaway hit.

The other thing you’ll need to do is to make sure everyone knows the lie behind the weekly box-office figures. Repeat it, incessantly, to anyone and everyone who will listen. The "Number One Movie in America" is nothing but a bald-faced lie. A lie. A lie. A lie.

Interestingly, Hollywood studios are so addicted to proclaiming their movie to be Number One, that they’ve made up yet another lie, one that goes strangely unchallenged. And that’s the "all-time box office champ."

Rebecca McCadney touches on this only briefly in her article. The truth is, the idiots who compile the list of the all-time box office champs are equaled in stupidity only by the people who believe it. Here’s a typical list, provided by boxofficeguru.com, complete with the year that the film was made, plus domestic grosses in millions of dollars (US) in its intial year of release, unless indicated otherwise. The list is accurate as of July 20; some films are still in release and their positions may change. Now scan the list and see if you can figure out why this is a lie, before reading on

1) Titanic 1997 $600.8

2) Star Wars (includes ‘97 rerelease) 1977 $461.0

3) E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (includes ’02 rerelease) 1982 $435.0

4) Star Wars Epsisode I : The Phantom Menace 1999 $431.1

5) Spiderman 2002 $403.7

6) Jurassic Park 1993 $357.1

7) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers 2002 $339.7

8) Forrest Gump 1994 $329.7

9) The Lion King (includes 2003 rerelease) 1994 $328.5

10) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 2001 $317.6

11) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 2001 $313.4

12) Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones 2002 $310.7

13) Return of the Jedi (includes ’97 rerelease) 1983 $309.1

14) Independence Day 1996 $306.2

15) Finding Nemo 2003 $303.8

16) The Sixth Sense 1999 $293.5

17) The Empire Strikes Back (includes ’97 rerelease) 1980 $290.3

18) Home Alone 1990 $285.8

19) The Matrix Reloaded 2003 $275.3

20) Shrek 2001 $267.7

And so on, all the way down to #50, Armageddon, 1998, with $201.6 million. As you may have noticed, almost every single film on the list was released or re-released in the past 10 years. Not counting rereleases, only 10 of the 50 films on the list predate 1993 – Home Alone, Jaws, Batman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, Ghost, Aladdin, Back to the Future, and Terminator 2, the 1991 movie which occupies the #47 slot with a paltry $204.8 million. The oldest film on the list is Jaws, released in 1975.

In case you still haven’t figure it out, the dollar figures reflect higher ticket prices! Your grandpa may have paid 50 cents to see a movie; today, the bargain matinees costs $6.75. The people who run the boxofficeguru.com web site concede as much with a note saying the list does not account for rising ticket prices. However, they do not provide an alternate list which adjusts for inflation, or counts the number of tickets sold. But at least they choose to mention it; most entertainment reporters breathlessly parrot these figures without question. And only a precious few stop to wonder how It Happened One Night (1934), Gone With the Wind (1938), or Casablanca (1942) can be excluded from a list of all-time performers, while a dubious flick such as Twister (1996, in the #29 slot) or Rush Hour 2 (2001, in the #37 slot) are named as contenders.

I once heard that if you do adjust for inflation, Gone With the Wind tops the list, while Titanic slips into the #9 position. That’s still an impressive figure; however, the flick does not deserve the mantle of all-time box office champ. (And just wait; once movie tickets reach $15 each, Titanic will be displaced by some turkey, and only then will people cry fowl.)

In the meantime, go to Landmark. They’re the only bastion of sanity in this increasingly blockbuster-driven world. Word has it that Whale Rider is going to be this years My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Lee Zion is a journailist and novelist. He writes for the San Diego Business Journal, and is the author of the Ferriman dectective series.

Rebecca McCadney invites your ideas, insights, reviews, arguments, thoughts and incredibly wrong opinions:
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