Terrifying Audiences Back Into the Theater

PLUS: Please Sir, May I Finish My Show?

Author

Steve
October 15, 2024

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Terrifying Audiences Back Into the Theater

I’m going to take the most humble of victory laps here. A few weeks ago, on the topic of whether streaming helps or hurts the theatrical business, I wrote:

Hollywood, streamers, and theatrical exhibition can absolutely bring audiences back in to the movies, but it’s going to take coordinated, intentional effort, and avoiding panicking if the first weekend’s box office is below expectations. If you want audiences to think it’s special, you have to make it special!

Why a victory lap? Well, because over at The Wrap, this strategy is the reason why Terrifier 3 — an independent movie with a $2 million production budget and a $500,000 marketing budget — sat atop the box office, beating major studio releases like The Wild Robot and a certain other clown-focused film.

Obviously the team behind Terrifier 3 did not base their release plan for the film on anything I wrote, I simply described what anyone with a functioning brain stem working in the business can see, which is that approaching movie releases holistically will have much better results than “randomly shotgunning money at the marketing and panicking as soon as the film has a bad opening weekend.”

From The Wrap:

It’s a weekend that has floored Chris McGurk, CEO of the company that distributed “Terrifier 3,” Cineverse…

“The first thing, the thing we learned more than anything, was the power of our ecosystem. We have 30 bespoke channels with 800 million viewers we can market to. We have over 40 podcasts in our podcast network, and we had to leverage it as much as we could. We also built an ad sales team and technology we own ourselves that helps us identify where the fans are and how we can market to them in the most effective way.”

The word synergy is gross and creepy for many reasons, one of which being it was the inspiration for my reviled high school rock band Sinnergy, but this is a case of synergy being quite useful. “We own a bunch of horror outlets, it will be easy to advertise this to horror fans” is quite a difference from the average type of streaming synergy, where you launch a Byzantine TV show universe tied to your theatrically-released films but only available on your service, or produce an original for which you have a perfunctory limited release and then permanently hide behind your paywall.

“We really wanted to eventize the movie, daring people to see it in a group because you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. And it paid off because we saw heavy group turnouts where people were showing up in groups of nine or 10…

Our whole goal this time was to focus on the dark humor and the camp of the films and turn Art the Clown into the next Freddy like the Bloody Disgusting guys thought he could be. Focus on the scares and the humor more than the gore, because the gore fans are already going to come in. So we tried to market to the audience that might tag along with those gore fans, a more female crowd and Hispanic and African-American audiences as well.”

Wow! Imagine thinking a film’s theatrical release should be an event. That’s crazy! You mean if you give audiences a reason to go to the theater, they will? What is this dark magic?!

Even if Terrifier is too gross/gory for you, if you think the theater experience is important and crucial to the future of filmmaking, you should be thrilled at its box office success. It charts a path forward that is achievable! Will the studios and streamers listen? (Narrator: No).

Please Sir, May I Finish My Show?

Speaking of streamer dysfunction, I love and co-sign this primal scream by Ben Travis over at Empire, addressing how difficult it is for streaming shows to build an audience.

It’s the pressure, the rush, the whack-a-mole game of trying to watch something before it’s unceremoniously yanked, amid a deluge of never-ending ‘content’. With so many high-profile shows culled after a single season (KAOS, The Acolyte, Lockwood & Co., The Midnight Club, to name but a few) it feels clearer than ever: you need to be an instant mega-smash to avoid the axe. Across multiple platforms, streaming services are expecting audiences to watch everything now to prove their interest. Even for series with critical acclaim, the omnipresent executioner looms.

The executives in charge at the streaming platforms are presumably bound and determined to reinvent the wheel in every circumstance relating to TV, even though we have decades of experience in how TV shows build audiences over time. There’s unfortunately no interest in replicating this, despite the fact that the streaming services themselves used to signal that they were the home of under-appreciated gems, as the article notes.

Early on, Netflix’s bonus Arrested Development seasons, its revival of Gilmore Girls, and the long-awaited Deadwood movie on HBO Max sent a clear message: TV was where your favorite series went to die; streaming is where they live forever. Not anymore.

This is it exactly! Breaking Bad achieved its hit status in part due to Netflix subscribers binge-watching, yet I would guess if BB was a new Netflix show, it wouldn’t survive past season one.

None of this is to say old-school network TV always let stuff grow and build an audience. The Heather Graham sitcom “Emily’s Reasons Why Not” was infamously canceled after one episode, so too the 1980s show “Melba,” which had the misfortune of premiering the same day the Challenger exploded.

Will this behavior change? Probably not! Everyone now wants a giant, immediate hit. That’s what’s most impressive to stockholders and the business press. There’s nothing to be gained from nurturing a show’s small but loyal following into a gargantuan one.

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Some of the major announcements from this year’s Adobe Max event. (link)

How Epic’s win in Epic v. Google will benefit AR innovation. (link)

This movie disagreement almost destroyed Letterboxd. (link)