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Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

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Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#11

Post by shaftway »

flak48 wrote: post #2

TL;DR Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie at a local movie theater on June 10th. Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie. Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay that much, as replies to this comment are pointing o…

Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and they're only out of pocket $100.

I suspect the $25,488 was so low to keep it believeable.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#12

Post by DevKoala »

heavyset_go wrote: post #10
DevKoala wrote: post #9

I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

I doubt it's anything more than the cyclical nature of trends, and chance. There was already a movement away from Zoom to platforms that were less closed, but then the pandemic happened.

But the movement to leave Zoom happened due to the prominence of Zoom in many B2B companies that didn’t realize they were risking their security. Just reaching the status Zoom reached in 2019 is bonkers considering the competition had been at it for decades.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#13

Post by FirefoxIsSlow »

DevKoala wrote: post #9

I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

M$ charges money.

Cisco charges money.

Google discontinued their video/messaging services too many times for people to get used to.

Heck for a moment I thought "Houseparty" was going to be a new social media, but I think their push notifications were too annoying.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#14

Post by geoelectric »

shaftway wrote: post #11
flak48 wrote: post #2

TL;DR Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie at a local movie theater on June 10th. Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie. Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay that much, as replies to this comment are pointing o…

Did it cost them that much? I think it wasn't clear on that point. It looks like they rented the theater out for a fixed fee (since they have connections to the theater let's say it was $100). Then they can sell tickets and they get to keep the money for selling said tickets. So they sell tickets to themselves for $25,488. According to the theater that's the profit for the movie, and they're only out of pocket $100.…

either that, or the "ticket revenue" from selling out a full theater was ~$5100. Average theater seats about 2-300 people, so ~$20 a ticket (not sure of the per-ticket price, but it was the premiere after all) works out at 250 seats.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#15

Post by ascar »

While reading this I wondered how they ended up at a box office of $25,488. Did they really spent $25,488 and consider it as a "small fee" to be the first in box office?!

If I interpret the information about "four-walling" correctly, they actually paid the Cinema a much smaller fee to get all seats, but can then report all money they make of these seats as Box Office earnings.

The Westhampton Beach Theater has 425 seats [1]. 425 Seats * 5 viewings * $12 a ticket actually ends up at $25,500 or $25,488 if they did not report 1 ticket for whatever reason. As "any money they make off seats goes straight into their pockets", I suspect they simply sold the tickets of the 425*5 seats they rented for a flat fee for $12 a seat to themselves and reported that as Box Office.

[1] https://whbpac.org/general-information/

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#16

Post by sp332 »

DevKoala wrote: post #9

I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

Zoom is still in "growth phase" which means they aren't under a lot of pressure to turn a profit at this particular moment. So they proactively offered their free service to schools, the free tier isn't time-limited, plus their corporate product is basically the same as the consumer/free product.

And on the other side, Google was totally caught napping and assumed that everyone knew about Meet. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/technology/zoom-rivals-vi... "[Google’s chief business officer] Mr. Schindler tried placating the engineer’s concerns, the people said. Then his young son stumbled into view of the camera and asked if his father was talking to his co-workers on Zoom."

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#17

Post by floren »

teach wrote: post #5
koolba wrote: post #4

This is the same strategy as getting on the NY Times best seller list by literally buying lots of copies of your own book[1]. The key innovation is realizing how cheap it would be to make it to the top with nearly every theater in the USA closed. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/02/22/heres-...

I "participated" in a less nefarious strategy. In 2010, when the collection of short stories "Machine of Death" was about to be released, the editor Ryan North asked us not to pre-order. Instead, he suggested that we all wait and purchase the book on the same day from Amazon. The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it…

I was just listening to a podcast that included Steve Rinella lamenting that his recent wild game cookbook didn't make the NYT Best Seller list despite selling out on Amazon... If I remember correctly, it was precisely because of pre-orders. Thus, as he prepares to release his latest book, he's asking fans to buy the book, but to try and mix it up from just Amazon pre-ordering: pre-order at independent bookstores, order on release day, etc.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#18

Post by marcod1419 »

DevKoala wrote: post #9

I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

I would really like to know what went wrong with Google especially. They've had years to develop Hangouts and Meet, yet it's so, so behind in both performance and quality. Are both of these products just riddled with technical debt to the point that these improvements take significantly longer than normal?

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#19

Post by nordsieck »

flak48 wrote: post #2

TL;DR Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie at a local movie theater on June 10th. Which turned out to be more money 'earned' than any other movie in the US that day, allowing them to top the charts as the highest grossing movie. Edit: whoops, looks like I may have misunderstood and they probably didn't pay that much, as replies to this comment are pointing o…

> Two filmakers paid $25,488 to buy all seats for 5 screenings of their $0 production budget movie

The film studio usually gets the majority of the ticket sales for a movie, so even if they didn't have connections it would cost them much less than a normal person to rent out the theater.

> Arrangements vary, but the movie studio usually ends up with about 60 percent of the proceeds from American box offices.

> ...

> That figure varies according to the usual supply and demand principles — an extremely hot first-run movie may start out with distribution fees up to 90 percent (in other words, 90 percent of the fees during that time are going back to the studio). As the film stays in distribution longer, the fees go down since demand goes down until eventually the theater replaces it with a different film.

https://theweek.com/articles/647394/when-buy-movie-ticket-wh...

Given that the theaters were completely empty at the time, I'm sure they could have negotiated some pretty good rates.

Re: Unsubscribe: The $0-budget movie that ‘topped the US box office’

#20

Post by Twirrim »

DevKoala wrote: post #9

I find it amusing that Zoom’s user experience allowed it to capture the market to such degree that is now making waves in pop culture. How did Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc get it so wrong all of these years?

It's a story repeated ad nauseam, but the founder of Zoom came from Cisco, after having been in charge of WebEx there. Cisco had refused to let him do what he saw needed done to radically improve WebEx, and so he left and created Zoom and did it there.

Cisco just saw a product that was successful at the time, and a senior exec that wanted to spend a lot of money to ultimately still only have video conferencing software. They were wrong with their decision, but it's an entirely understandable one.

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