The Passion is doing well on weekdays - a good sign, it would seem, as to how it will do this weekend. It's being pulling in around $10 million each weekday, which is a good sign for the weekend when you consider, again, that a movie's strongest during its debut weekend, then depending on how well the movie is being received, begins to drastically decline. This is partly why distributors seek such wide releases for the opening weekend - a movie can expect to, at the very least, have a strong opening weekend. But once word of mouth takes over, it will experience sharp declines. Except for blockbusters. They will decline, but the drop is not so severe. Return of the King was also pulling north of $10 million in the weekdays after its debut. But, Return of the King also had an advantage that The Passion does not. The week after its debut was the week of Christmas, and so children were out of school, the movie was rated PG-13 so they were all able to see it, etc. So it's something to note that, all those things advantages being absent here, the movie is still showing strong. You're seeing a lot of repeat viewing, for one, and despite its religious theme, the movie actually seems to be garnering a much broader appeal. This is not your typical kitschy Christian crap, but from most accounts, is a film with craft, one that is well-made, interesting, and emotionally quite powerful. I'll be interested to see how it performs in its second weekend.
On a slightly different note, I was reading some economic of film the other day, and I learned some interesting things about the film industry. The economists who work in this area say that the market for motion pictures is unique among all other products because motion pictures suffer from "maximum uncertainty." That is, because film is an "experience good" - one does not know what one likes until one experiences the film - suppliers do not know beforehand what people want. They do not, in other words, know "demand." But, this is not simply a situation of asymmetric information, because oddly enough, even consumers suffer from the same problem. They, too, do not know what they want. This creates a lot of uncertainty and a lot of risk around the production of films. A famous saying by one screenwriter (Goldman I think) is "no one knows anything" about what will be received. There are no rules for making a blockbuster. Executives may rely heavily on formula - using star power, using narrow formulas, etc. - but they have no ability to make a movie a blockbuster. So it makes for an interesting market.
I also read an article in a law review journal which revisted the Paramount antitrust cases of the 1930s. In the Paramount cases, the courts found the studios to be behaving in an anti-competitive fashion. They broke the studios up considerably. There was vertical integration in the market - that means, studios not only created the product, but they also owned the exhibiting houses. So, for instance, Paramount owned chains of exhibition houses across the country, which gave them the ability to show exclusively Paramount films. Likewise, they participated in actions which the counts found anti-competitive like "block booking" - writing contracts which forced independant exhibitors to accept other less popular films for the more popular ones. So you couldn't just buy individual films - you had to buy also these ones over here that might be really bad. Two economists revisit these cases and argue that the Paramount was wrong on efficiency grounds. They make an interesting argument - one that I won't reproduce here until, possibly, I actually finish reading it. But they actually argue that those previous practices were not monopolistic, but were actually efficient organizational developments within the industry which were entirely due to the unique problems that motion pictures presented - things like maximum uncertainty, for instance.
Posted by scott at March 5, 2004 07:11 AM | TrackBack