Friday, September 12, 2003

Industry brief: Movies 6 Part 1    2    3    4    5 What globalism? While U.S. films are boffo box office across the world, the opposite is not true. Outside of New York (and, to a lesser degree, Los Angeles), it is becoming increasingly rare to see anything but the two or three highest profile foreign language films screened for even a week. There aren't enough screens available for all the films that are out there. Many of the former art houses were bought out by chains, then discarded when it became clear that they could never be big moneymakers for them. Even highly commercial foreign films have fewer sympathetic venues. It's not from a lack of material - there are now more independent and foreign-language films made than ever,  but a lack of available shelves. You might think that the large chains, with lots of quasi-empty screenings, would take a chance. But Just as Bud, Miller and Coors push all but a few imports and mictobrews off the supermarket beer shelves, so too the big studios push smaller movies out of the cineplexes. It's true that you can still get imported beers in a thousand varieties in specialty beer stores and liquor markets, but you'll have less luck finding the latest Polish or Belgian film. Foreign-language films generally make less money than the most ho-hum Hollywood release. The few weeks of release aren't time enough to build an audience, and no one is trying. It's a lot easier to stock the brands that have a big marketing budget and/or automatic mindspace. We call this phenomenon "elbowing". This leads to the Catch-22 of movies going unreleased because there's not enough public interest, whereas there's no public interest because the films haven't been released and therefore written about. True, there are always a few non-major-studio films that do well (Life is Beautiful, The Full Monty, Crouching Tiger). But these are a tiny portion of the many films produced abroad never make it on the shelves. on average only one foreign art movie really succeeds in any given year. . For most of the distributors who used to import art films, the problem runs even further down the line. These days, few broadcasters are buying --especially if the film is in a foreign language. This is something of a mystery. With the explosion of television channels you'd think there would be more, not fewer, opportunities to screen such movies. Whatever claims there are for the new globalism, there are few shelves available on any channel for foreign films in the U.S. Foreign DVDs suffer much the same fate. Like the studios, the movie chains are only focused on blockbusters.  And unless a film has a chance to be a megahit, there's no interest. So in spite of lots of empty seats at the cineplex and more screens than ever, foreign films haven't much of a chance. 9:19:07 PM

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