On the trail of a movie mystery

Any movie buff on Saipan can attest to the same frustration—for weeks, you’re shown previews for a movie that looks really good to you. You eagerly await its opening, only to find out that our theater won’t be showing that particular flick. What?! How could our theater pass on a movie that looks so good? And if they don’t plan on showing it, why do they tease us by showing the previews for it?

It’s understandable how, without much knowledge, many people find the theater management to be an easy target for blame. If they bring in a stinker like After the Sunset, but pass on a movie with widespread critical acclaim, like Ray, they must be insane, right? Wrong. Truth is there really is nobody to blame. Simply put, the reason we miss the occasional major movie is the fact that we live on a small rock in the middle of a big ocean. Of course I plan to give a few more details than that, but more importantly, we can explore some information that might help us predict which movies might or might not make it here, in the future.

In order to understand what’s going on, it’s necessary to know a little bit about movie distribution. After a movie is made, its distributor decides how many copies to print. Every print costs a couple thousand dollars, so they only print as many copies as they think they can get a return on. A movie with wide appeal, like Spiderman 2, will get around 4,000 prints, while a movie with less potential, like Vanity Fair, might get maybe 1,000 prints or less.

Theaters and theater chains then negotiate with the distributors to secure a lease for the film. The vast majority of the money that comes in from box office receipts goes straight to the distributor, with the theater keeping barely enough to cover operating expenses. This explains, by the way, why the food is sometimes more expensive than admission—without the concession stand, the theater wouldn’t even be able to stay afloat.

Since there are a limited number of prints, the distributor has to decide which theaters to send a print to, and which theaters to snub. This might come as a huge shock, but believe it or not, Saipan is not a particularly large or profitable market. If a distributor has to decide between sending their movie to Saipan or a large city, you can guess where they think they’ll turn a larger profit.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why some movies don’t make it here. More often than not, it’s probably the distributor who’s rebuffed on our theater, rather than the other way around. Rudi Marshall, general manager of Hollywood Theater, and Marlene Peters, of Wallace Theaters (Hollywood Theater parent company) both assured me that it’s in their best interest to bring all major releases to Saipan, so that’s something that they want to do, but are sometimes turned down by the distributor.

Okay, so how do we use this information to keep from having our hopes let down in the future? We need to pay attention to a few magic numbers, and what time of year it is. At Peters’ suggestion, I looked for a correlation between the number of prints a movie has and whether or not it makes it here. Indeed, there is such a correlation, with seasonal variations.

Through all of 2004, the number of major films we missed out on ranges from three to 30, depending on how we choose to define “major.” For purposes of this article, I’m going use 2,000 prints as a benchmark for a “major” movie, and by that standard, we missed a total 15 movies this year.

Here’s the key statistic to look at: During the slow months (January-April, September and October), we missed 12 movies, while only missing three in the busy months (summertime and holiday season). This makes perfect sense. During the busy seasons, our theater is relatively busy, and thus turning a nice profit for the distributors, while in the slow months, our theater is pretty much empty, making it less likely that a distributor will send their movie our way.

There are many websites that list how many prints a movie will have, the best of which is www.boxofficemojo.com. You can use this information to gauge the probability of a movie making it here. Let me give you the magic numbers to pay attention to.

During May, June, July, August, November, and December, if a movie has 2,000 prints or more, it’s almost assured to make it here. A movie with between 1,500-2,000 prints could potentially make it here, but probably won’t. You’ll have to wait until it’s on DVD for most anything with less than 1,500 prints.

The rest of the year is a little less predictable. If a movie has 3,000 prints or more, we’re getting it. We’ll probably get one with 2,700-3,000 prints, but it’s not assured. It’s a crapshoot with any movie between 2,000-2,700 prints—maybe we’ll get it, maybe we won’t. Anything less than 2,000 is extremely doubtful.

By the way, they’re not actually teasing us by showing previews for movies that won’t make it here. Previews come attached to a movie, so the theater has no control over what previews they show.

At the end of all this talk, it might benefit us to try and keep things in perspective. Longtime residents of Saipan can remember the theater we used to endure. That old theater was quaint, in a really wretched and uncomfortable way. Hollywood Theater, by contrast, stacks up quite nicely when compared to multiplexes in the States. While it might not compare in quality (screen size, surround sound) to the best of the best theaters, it is certainly as good as the average neighborhood multiplex in any suburb, and much better than most theaters in small towns (and Saipan is a small town). I know this sounds a little like an advertisement, and I wish I could say that I’m being compensated with free popcorn or something like that, but I’m not; this is just the simple truth—we’ve got it good.