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The Right Way To Do Hollywood Accounting!

How to Find An Audience

New York Times

October 28, 2007

by

Michael Cieply

Edited by Jeffrey Taylor for Clarity and Content

While Malibu was burning last weekend, Ben Affleck and Miramax Films watched “Gone Baby Gone” do the same. The crime drama opened sixth at the box office with $5.5 million in domestic ticket sales and little promise of much more to come. Three spots back, behind the umpteenth rerelease of Tim Burton's “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” Reese Witherspoon and New Line Cinema did even worse with “Rendition.” This heavily promoted political drama took in just over $4 million.

As for “Things We Lost in the Fire” from Bernicio Del Toro, Halle Berry and DreamWorks, why bother to torture the metaphor? The love-and-death drama took in $1.6 million.

All three pictures, and a dozen more headed to the marketplace by Christmas, share a common business problem. They are what film marketers in their private moments call “movies for no one.”

That doesn’t mean they’re bad pictures. It means they have no obvious appeal to any of the four big demographic groups at which Hollywood has typically aimed its wares: males 17 to 24 years old, males 25 to 49, females 17 to 24 and females 25 to 49.

The industry’s more nuanced movies must work to find an audience. And the audience must work to figure them out.

And if the movie business is to keep making these smart little dramas in which ambitious actors and prize-hungry filmmakers take their annual shot at the gold, it will have to start doing what car makers and packaged-goods companies have always done: sharpen the message and narrow the targets.

In the last few months OTX’s worldwide motion picture group has been working Hollywood with a novel proposition: that companies vastly increase the size of groups on which it tests promotional materials for its “movies for no one,” a step that could put things in perspective for less than $200,000, about the cost of four or so focus groups.

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