{"id":67173,"date":"2015-06-16T12:30:56","date_gmt":"2015-06-16T17:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=67173"},"modified":"2015-06-16T19:09:17","modified_gmt":"2015-06-17T00:09:17","slug":"how-does-a-movie-gain-an-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/06\/16\/how-does-a-movie-gain-an-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"How Does a Movie Gain an Audience?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saturday night, I went to the 7:30 showing of \u201cMe and Earl and the Dying Girl.\u201d The movie had just opened, so I went early. I didn\u2019t want the local teens to grab the all the good seats \u2013 you know, that thing where maybe four people from the group are in the theater but they\u2019ve put coats, backpacks, and other place markers over two dozen seats for their friends, who eventually come in five minutes after they feature has started.<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t happen. The theater (the AMC on Broadway at 68th St.) was two-thirds empty (one-third full if you\u2019re an optimist), and there were no teenagers. Fox Searchlight, I thought, is going to have to do a lot of searching to find a big enough audience to cover the $6 million they paid for the film at Sundance. The box office for the first weekend was $196,000 which put it behind 19 other movies.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t write off \u201cMe and Earl\u201d as a bad investment. Not yet. According to a story in Variety<\/a>,<\/em> Searchlight is looking that \u201cMe and Earl\u201d will be to the summer of 2015 what \u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d was to the summer of 2004. Like \u201cNapoleon Dynamite,\u201d \u201cMe and Earl\u201d was a festival hit but with no established stars and debt director (though Gomez-Rejon has done television \u2013 several \u201cGlees\u201d and \u201cAmerican Horror Storys\u201d). \u201cNapoleon\u201d grossed only $210,000 its first week, but its popularity kept growing \u2013 slowly at first, then more rapidly as word spread \u2013 eventually becoming cult classic. Searchlight is hoping that \u201cMe and Earl\u201d follows a similar path.<\/p>\n

The other important similarity between \u201cNapoleon\u201d and \u201cEarl\u201d is that both were released in the same week as a Very Big Movie \u2013 \u201cHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban\u201d in 2004, \u201cJurassic World\u201d last weekend. That too plays a part in how a film catches on (or doesn\u2019t).<\/p>\n

In an earlier\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0I graphed the growth in cumulative box office receipts for two movies \u2013 \u201cMy Big Fat Greek Wedding\u201d and \u201cTwilight.\u201d\u00a0 The shapes of the curves illustrated two different models of the diffusion of ideas.\u00a0 In one (\u201cGreek Wedding\u201d), the influence came from within the audience of potential moviegoers, spreading by word of mouth. In the other (\u201cTwilight\u201d), impetus came from outside \u2013 highly publicized news of the film\u2019s release hitting everyone at the same time.\u00a0I was working from a description of these models in sociologist Gabriel Rossman\u2019s\u00a0Climbing the Charts<\/a><\/i>.<\/p>\n

You can see these patterns again in the box office charts for the two movies from the summer of\u00a0 2004 \u2013 \u201cHarry Potter\/Azkaban\u201d and \u201cNapoleon Dynamite.\u201d (I had to use separate Y-axes in order to get David and Goliath on the same chart; data from BoxOfficeMojo<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHarry Potter\u201d starts huge, but after the fifth week the increase in total box office tapers off quickly. \u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d starts slowly. But in its fifth or sixth week, its box office numbers are still growing, and they continue to increase for another two months before finally dissipating. The convex curve for \u201cHarry Potter\u201d is typical where the forces of influence are \u201cexogenous.\u201d The more S-shaped curve of \u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d usually indicates that an idea is spreading within the system.<\/p>\n

But the Napoleon curve is not purely the work of the internal dynamics of word-of-mouth diffusion. The movie distributor plays an important part in its decisions about how to market the film – especially when and where to release the film. The same is true of \u201cHarry Potter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Warner Bros. strategy for \u201cHarry Potter\u201d was to open big \u2013 in theaters all over the country. In some places, two or more of the screens at the multi-plex would be running the film. After three weeks, the movie began to disappear from theaters, going from 3,855 screens in week #3 to 605 screens in week #9.<\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNapoleon Dynamite\u201d opened in only a small number of theaters \u2013 six to be exact.\u00a0 But that number increased steadily until by week #17, it was showing in more than 1,000 theaters.<\/p>\n

\"12\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to separate the exogenous forces of the movie business from the endogenous word-of-mouth \u2013 the biz from the buzz.\u00a0 Were the distributor and theater owners responding to an increased interest in the movie generated from person to person? Or were they, through their strategic timing of advertising and distribution, helping to create the film\u2019s popularity? We can\u2019t know for sure, but probably both kinds of influence were happening. It might be clearer when the economic desires of the business side and the preferences of the audience don\u2019t match up, for example, when a distributor tries to nudge a small film along, getting it into more theaters and spending more money on advertising, but nobody\u2019s going to see it. This discrepancy would clearly show the influence of word-of-mouth; it\u2019s just that the word would be, \u201cdon\u2019t bother.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saturday night, I went to the 7:30 showing of \u201cMe and Earl and the Dying Girl.\u201d The movie had just opened, so I went early. I didn\u2019t want the local teens to grab the all the good seats \u2013 you know, that thing where maybe four people from the group are in the theater but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":67175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,36,129,343,693],"class_list":["post-67173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture","tag-economics","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-public-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/06\/24.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67173"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67187,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67173\/revisions\/67187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}