Monday, July 30, 2007

Summer of the Sequels

I went to a video store yesterday hoping to rent The Bourne Supremacy, in preparation of next week's release of The Bourne Ultimatum.

An entire section was devoted to the precursors to this year's sequels. All of the movies from the Shrek, Die Hard, Harry Potter, Spider-man series, and many, many others were collected under a custom sign proclaiming: "The Summer of the Sequels." And most, like The Bourne Supremacy, were checked out.

Movie Theatres missed a huge opportunity here. These films, the originals, should have been brought back to theatres for a limited run. They would have benefited from all of the hype surrounding their sequels. Instead, cinemas put the same 3 or 4 movies (many of them duds) on all 18 of their screens week after week.

More and more movie buffs are choosing to stay home. Movie Theatre management needs to wise up!

EDIT: After writing this post, I discovered two theatres with Harry Potter marathons of the first four films (one of which has already occured). Bravo to these theatres.
- 07/16-21 AFI Silver Theatre, Silver Spring Maryland
- 09/01-03 Castro Theatre, San Francisco, CA

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cinearts Pleasant Hill also played all of the previous Harry Potter films twice a day leading up to the release of the new film. Although, the new film showed at a theater a few blocks away.

Jonesy said...

Very cool. Are there any other special series like that in the future?

Anonymous said...

As far as I know, there aren't any more special series scheduled.

joen05 said...

That's an interesting thought. I'm a movie theatre manager, and I'll have to submit that idea somewhere. Keep up the good work! Would you like to perhaps exchange links?

http://joen05.blogspot.com