I’ve never met Michael L. Campbell (CEO of Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s largest movie theater chain) before, so its quite ignorant of me to call the man an idiot, but its no more ignorant than his response to a question in Saturday’s New York Times (Business Day, “Seeing DVD’s As a Boon to Theaters”). From the interview:
Q. Are film studios doing enough to draw people to theaters?
A. We're already having an up quarter. The balance of the year looks pretty strong. I think the studios are doing all they can do to deliver, but consumer taste is fickle.
They are doing all they can? How do you figure? What are they doing? The only two movies I remember people talking about last year were King Kong (a movie that has now been made for at least the 3rd time) and Brokeback Mountain (a love story between two gay cowboys). When you think about it…that’s pretty pathetic. I’m sure both are great movies (I haven’t seen them, I don’t go to movie theaters).
To me, when a company refers to it’s customers as consumers signifies their attitude towards the people who give them money for their product or services (referring to them as fickle only backs my assumption up). I am not a consumer that you can feed crap to and treat like a number. I am a customer that applies logic when making purchases and demands his money’s worth.
The current trend is for the studios to release more and more movies, with fewer and fewer of them being of any quality. I now ignore movie advertising altogether. Word of mouth is the only thing I rely on these days. In fact, watching the Oscars (yes I watched, but only because of Jon Stewart) there were so many movies I had never even heard of, including best picture “Crash”. Am I alone on this?
Meanwhile, TV shows are getting better and better. It started with the Sopranos. Now we have 24, The Shield, Rescue Me, Prison Break, etc…shows that are gripping…that compel you not to miss an episode (HBO and The FX Network have the best formula, since they allow you at least one more opportunity to watch a show you missed during the week…I solved the problem by getting TiVO for Fox). 3 years ago I would watch 4 to 6 movies (Netflix, BlockBuster, and HBO) and 2 to 3 television shows a week, now I watch 1 movie (BlockBuster) and 6 to 8 television shows. I have a finite amount of time every week, and with TV quality going up and movie quality going down TV is now king in my house.
I made it a rule to never go to a movie theater again over 6 years ago (my reasons are in rant format, second to last paragraph of http://marvets.com/blog/archive/2005/07/26/251.aspx). It used to be difficult. Not anymore. I haven’t had the slightest urge to visit a movie theater in the past year. This fickle consumer was attracted to better content (thanks Sopranos) with an easy to use medium (thanks TiVO).
The music industry pissed off a lot of “consumers” over the past 8 or so years before they figured out that the world had changed and they in turn changed their business model. I hope the movie industry figures out how to attract us “fickle consumers” without pissing us off in the process. The world has changed and they didn’t see it coming. It’s time to start play catch up.