We need for ticket prices to come down. I think it’s not healthy… if you look for example at how every Tuesday in America, every single Tuesday is the biggest day of the week. Why? Because of the half-price tickets. It’s fundamental consumer economics: just lower the prices and you’ll sell more. You’ll make it up in volume, and concessions. I do think that is relevant for young consumers. They all have their streaming services, which because you pay by the month, it feels like it’s free. And movies, particularly in big urban markets, they’re expensive. So that means it better be super special. I wish exhibition could see its way towards doing more pricing experiments, not taking them up, but taking them down.

There’s a value proposition in pricing for two constituencies that are important to us. Kids are trying to make rent, they don’t have a lot of disposable income. And the second very significant pricing-sensitive segment is the family audience. It’s too dang expensive to take your whole family to the movies right now, even if the kids get in half price or whatever.

I sound like I’m arguing against my own business, but I’m not. I’m lobbying that I think we would endear ourselves much more, particularly to that family audience, if the price is moderated some… for a lot of people bringing a family of four or six to the movies, that can be an expensive undertaking.

The audience in general, but particularly a younger audience, no longer goes to the movies. They go to a movie. It is now a programmatically driven decision, not an overall behavioral decision… What is it about a particular movie that is significant and compelling and urgently relatable enough for me that I’m going to go to see it? In which case, they will absolutely go to the movies, absolutely, but they will not do it as a matter of course.

In the movie, this match occurs in the later afternoon to early evening, but over our three week shooting span – we obviously shot out of order, many times at the wrong time of the day or in lighting conditions different than previously shot. The electricians provided 2 soft suns to ensure key was from the right direction at all times, but beyond that there was not much lighting control… so Daniel and I knew for sure that we would need to substantially re-light the environment once the edit was tightened up. To aid in this effort we oversaw a multi-day highly detailed scanning process acquiring both lidar and full photogrammetry of the environment with various lighting conditions.

It was easier for the actors to maintain their form if they didn’t also have to think about actually striking the ball – so we added a ton of CG tennis balls to help them here. Also Daniel and I worked with the AD team to ensure we had the tennis doubles go first on most setups – giving the VFX team ample, and actually useable, reference. For face replacements we made sure to allot sufficient scan time to capture enough expressions on each actor for full control – Zero’s face pipeline was able to deliver key frame-able animation with a ML-finishing process, so their team could dial in facial performance and then put the finishing touches in from their trained models.