The major story in Hollywood, says Jeff Goldstein, president of Global Distribution for Warner Bros. Pictures, is how expensive it’s getting to make movies and to market them to a fragmented audience even as technology sends first reactions to a film around the world in a “nanosecond.”
“That’s the bigger story here,” he said on a CinemaCon panel Monday as the Las Vegas confab kicked off with talk of windows, marketing, cinema advertising and international markets. “The economics of making motion pictures” are more problematic now than ever. “What’s that value proposition? he said. “How do you make movies that net a studio money in today’s economy, and particularly from legacy studios? It’s much different than streaming companies that have different kind of funding.”
“We have to figure out how we can right the ship,” he said, adding, “I think that we’ll get there pretty soon … because we have to, we don’t have a choice.”
Goldstein joined Paramount Pictures president of International Distribution Mark Viane, Cinepolis CEO Alejandro Ramirez Magana and Vue CEO Tim Richards to delve into what we all know: that marketing is a massive challenge for films and cinemas. Michael O’Leary, president and CEO of Cinema United (formerly NATO) moderated.
“I sit right in the middle of that,” said Goldstein. “The dollars we spend are, in many cases, much greater than we’ve ever spent before, but the effectiveness is much less … when you look at those numbers, quite frankly, it does keep you up at night, and it keeps me up at night.”
“We are looking, as an industry, at how do you get that audience? … The fact that you have to hit a bull’s-eye right in the center [because] now you don’t get past the previews. The world is a village and information gets out in a nanosecond and it can really kill a concept that you may have been working out for a long period of time.”
He continued, “The world is a village, and the information gets out in a nanosecond … Unfortunately, Warner Bros has had a few misses with really expensive movies and at our postmortems we’ll go back and say, ‘Okay, what did we do wrong? What would we like to do next time? And how do we overcome it?’… So much of it is frustration of not to be able to reach an audience.”
Viane agreed that the market is “so fragmented right now. You have to hit so many bull’s-eyes. A hit marketing plan one month can’t be replicated the next. What we really are trying to focus on is whatever message that we’re coming out, how is that going to connect and relate to that specific audience … But then, as Jeff said, the information is spreading. So it’s really hard to keep those messages separate, and it’s very expensive.”
“That is, I think, our biggest challenge — how much money we’re spending” in this new climate.
Viane also voiced concern about the cinemagoing experience being offered to audiences, specifically questioning the issue of preshows that risk turning off moviegoers.
“We have for years and years talked about the experience of going to the cinema. You know how you go to a restaurant and it’s a bad experience? You don’t return. Experience is everything,” he said. “Advertising obviously is something vitally important from a financial standpoint, but in today’s world you can sit at home and not watch any commercials. But now customers go to the cinema and watch commercials — it’s almost counterintuitive. And I know it’s not easy just to turn it off, but I do think it’s something that we need to continue to work on.”