The strategy, in part, is just good economics. Over the years, Hollywood’s gurus shuffled movies around to maximize revenue: artsy Oscar bait over the holidays, horror films before Halloween, and big, blockbuster CGI spectacles in the summer when our collective capacity for critical thinking reaches its nadir.
Somewhere along the way, that logic became too tidy and prescriptive. The industry slowly realized the popcorn-stuffed polloi don’t want to watch all the finely crafted tear-jerkers in December and, every once in a while, in the middle of winter, they get thirsty for a bro in tights. Moviegoers, it seems, aren’t so easily typecast.
Meanwhile, June, July, and August are no longer an entertainment dead zone outside of movie theaters. Whereas summer television was traditionally ruled by meaningless baseball games and sitcom reruns, it’s now a battlefield on which a full-scale entertainment war is being waged by streaming platforms and prestige programming. This year it was HBO’s Game of Thrones taking on stand-up comedy specials by Dave Chappelle on Netflix and Hulu’s Emmy Award-winning The Handmaid’s Tale.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. Chief Financial Officer Craig Ramsey says movie attendance tends to be cyclical. Slumps like the one we saw this summer tend to worsen because consumers miss out on the industry’s best advertising: the trailers before the main feature. That’s why, Ramsey (and his investors) were inordinately relieved to see that crowds are massing for It.
“Moviegoing begets moviegoing,” he said at last week’s conference. “We’ve got some movies, I think, coming up in the remainder of September and certainly the rest of the fourth quarter, where we can really kick-start the business and I think be back to kind of more normal attendance levels.”
He may be right. The rest of 2017 is well stocked with monsters like Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the cult Harrison Ford hit, two highly anticipated superhero films—Thor: Ragnarok debuting on Nov. 3 and Justice League just before Thanksgiving—before finishing with the latest Star Wars installment, The Last Jedi, on Dec. 15, the paragon of a blockbuster franchise. More important, however, is that the final season of Game of Thrones won’t be out for months.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.