5th
Box Office and Running Times
In response to a Matthew Yglesias posting I read.
Your question about Public Enemy got me thinking, and I’ve had some experience in production and working in a theater, so I made a few charts.
There really doesn’t seem to be any positive correlation between running time and box office gross, just examining the most successful films of all time and in the last year.
Just looking at these lists reminds me of the Will Smith Theory of Box Office: according to an often-repeated story, at the beginning of Will Smith’s film career, he and his agent sat down and listed the most successful films of all time, and came to the conclusion that if Will wanted to make a huge splash, he had better wait to be offered a special-effects heavy franchise epic, because they tend to dominate the lists of highest-grossing films. Thus, he passes on several straight comedy roles in order to work for Michael Bey on a special-effects heavy franchise, “Bad Boys,” and then on “Independence Day.” Special-effects heavy franchise epics generally dominate the top box office lists, and films of this genre, as a rule, are safely over the two-hour mark.
Making a film shorter, thus maximizing the number of engagements in a day, will only make a film more profitable if the film is selling out the engagements it has, if it’s leaving ticket sales on the table that could be otherwise engaged. Very few films are able to sell out after the first week or so — exhibitors have a lot of capacity and, if a film is terribly popular, can use 24-hour schedules in certain markets to print even more tickets. A much more common scenario is when the number of open seats in a film’s saturday screenings exceeds the number of sellable seats in the house, at which point the theater owner knows that he’s wasting seats on the film and is likely to start bumping some of the show’s engagements in favor of a new release. People generally schedule their day around seeing the film they want, and thanks to Fandango they have very good information about when the film they want to see shows, and they can even secure their admission without having to chance a sold-out screening.
This means that, at this time in the exhibition business, there isn’t very much liquidity in the audience in the lobby: there are very few people who go to a theater at an arbitrary time with the desire to see “any movie,” and there are very few people that will be turned away in the lobby from a sold-out film they wanted to see, and will select a 2nd choice in its stead. Thus, it doesn’t necessarily pay to have many screenings on offer to entice a crowd, to “keep them in the store” or to “attract traffic,” because the crowd is generally sold on whatever movie they want to see before they know what will be available at the multiplex. I guess you could interpret this as technological progress in the market: the ability to view schedules and book a screening on the Web allows the exhibitors to book fewer screenings per day (and thus to tolerate longer running-times), because the ability for theater-goers to pre-book a seat allows them to find an open seat much more efficiently than the old way of just showing up at a theater and taking their chances.
