Thinkcorps

Well, here’s what is hopefully the first in a short series of posts on the upcoming movie Serenity. They’re doing another round of preview screenings, this time for bloggers like me. So get over there and sign up. It’s probably going to be a madhouse, but who cares? At the very least I’ll get to see just who shows up at these screenings. (I’ve never been much of an opening night/weekend kind of guy.)

We’re also probably going to the PDX Browncoats Firefly benefit at the Guild Theater in SW PDX on Saturday, 24th. They’re going to be showing 3 episodes of the TV show and tickets benefit Mercy Corps. Plus, there’s costumes!

But back to Serenity.

Universal’s been doing fan screenings all summer, ever since the opening date got pushed back to September. This is an interesting strategy, and one I’m sure contradicts other traditional opening strategies. Which is best? What will work? I guess it all depends.

In Serenity’s case, Universal’s abandoned the idea that the only way to build anticipation and support for a film is by teasing us with graphics and videobytes (?). This is a tried-and-true strategy used by just about everyone, to the point where today, I see previews all the time that I swear I’ve seen several months before. This teasing gets so ahead of the film’s actual release that, in many cases, it seems inevitable that release dates are pushed back and money is wasted as whatever early buzz was generated evaporates. This really just leaves us consumers confused, as everyone’s teasing us with everything. The competitive advantage disappears.

Consensus I’ve read seems to indicate that since Serenity only cost $40M, Universal figured the film to be more or less a gimme profit-wise, giving them a golden opportunity to do some experimenting. Getting fans and bloggers together to support a film is a great idea, but I’ve never heard of so many advance screenings being held. These happened throughout the summer all across the US. They essentially popped that anticipation balloon and gave the product away—or did they?

Because we, as consumers, are bombarded by teasers, commercials, etc. begging for our attention dollars, there is a threshold a movie has to cross before you can consider it our “watch list”. We can’t see every film that comes out. This watch list is different for every person, but also includes levels—things we “must” see, things we “will” see, and “might” see.

Let’s face it, Hollywood makes its money on “will/might see” consumers. This is the majority of moviegoers, who want some entertainment but don’t care so much how they get it. The “must sees” are the fans, always a niche group.

So what Universal did was use the extra time they got from the later release date to marshall their “must see” audience into the theaters. This does one simple thing: it gives them word of mouth. You can’t get word of mouth from someone who hasn’t seen the film. If you expect that your film is good, then you should do whatever you can to generate your word of mouth before opening weekend.

This opening weekend is SO important, we know, and yet studios are still relying on a handful of reviewers, movie clips and TV appearances over the course of maybe 2 weeks beforehand to make that weekend opening a hit.

There’s just too much competition (read: media noise) for that to work anymore.

I don’t think that this strategy is in any way unique to Serenity. Every film has some franchise value to it. Serenity had its TV fans, but there’s all kinds of fans—movie star fans, indie film fans, genre fans, etc.

I think you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a film for which you couldn’t find fans. And if you did, then you should probably reconsider whether that film’s worth making.