All articles by Leonard Klady – Page 3
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News
Box office opinion: is word of mouth mere lip service'
No-one really knows what word-of-mouth is, whether it works or how to measure it. So what use is it, asks Leonard Klady. There can be few businesses where the received industry wisdom is so often wrong. Or to be more diplomatic, by the time anything looks set as a rule, ...
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News
Box office: the global perspective
With 2007 on course to break box-office records, Leonard Klady explores how developments in the international market hold the key to the future of the film industry. Widespread predictions that 2007 would break recent box-office records look to be well founded. The international box office generated $4.5bn in the first ...
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News
Box-office: undiscovered territory
Current measures of the international market fail to include more than a sixth of the world's population, says Len KladyThere was an odd popular culture annotation to the story of British seamen held captive in Iran, which was this week the subject of a major inquiry in the UK. One ...
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News
Wanted: new horizons
The film industry cannot base its hopes for expanding audiences on a diet of recycled ideas, says Leonard Klady. One of the most oft-heard industry phrases contends that 'it's a product-driven marketplace'. The simple implication being that good movies will bring more people into the multiplex.As with most truisms, it ...
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Features
The festival treasure hunt
Back in 1992, Canadian distributor Jim Murphy was on the prowl, as ever, for new, unheralded movies to acquire. On the opening day of the Cannes film festival, he trudged off to the Olympia Cinema for the first market screening of the day. It was a debut effort by an ...
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News
How to make a spider fly
The webslinger's runaway international success represents a first and a last for the movie business, says Leonard Klady. The $380m plus box office that Spider-Man 3 generated in its worldwide launch is both a theatrical anomaly and a harbinger of the future. The luck aspect of this record-breaking performance is ...
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Features
Cannes do attitudes
It is difficult to imagine what the mood was like at the inaugural Cannes film festival, which this year reaches its 60th birthday.The concept of an event celebrating cinema in all its manifestations and pitting films against each other competitively was still relatively novel back in 1946. The seaside resort ...
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Features
High-disappointment DVD
About two weeks ago, Jeffrey Katzenberg said in the course of an interview he was not particularly impressed with the new high-definition DVDs such as Blu-ray. He did not see much in the way of improvements from the standard format discs. Neither the image nor the sound did much to ...
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News
Box-office analysis: what dreams may come
The merger between London-based HanWay Films and France's Celluloid Dreams promises to produce 'bigger' films (see In Focus, p6-8). We'll have to see what 'bigger' encompasses in this case - but do not expect anything quite as grand as the sort of film Graham King produces or some of the ...
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Features
The fight to be seen
ShoWest convention last month, National Association of Theater Owners president John Fithian characterised the digital future of cinema-going as the most radical change to the way we watch movies since the advent of sound. Whether that proves to be true or not, it is fair to say the transition is ...
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Features
Playing to the crowd
One of the great debates for international film is why movies so rarely trouble the box office beyond their national boundaries. For all the talk of cultural diversity, the blockage generally comes down to the simple fact of language. Dubbing and subtitles remain a big obstacle.Finding ways to break through ...
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Features
Not a fare deal
Back in 1998, Luc Besson concocted an idea for a movie that would be sheer mayhem. According to lore, he had in mind nothing more than creating a serviceable story thread on which to hang a lot of vehicular action and the excuse to wreck a lot of cars: he ...
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Features
Ask the audience
Last year at the ShoWest exhibition convention, Motion Picture Association of America (Mpaa) chairman Dan Glickman announced a study to try to pin down the truth about that mysterious animal, the movie-goer.While there was a sense of who comprises the cinema-going audience, there has been no hard and fast survey ...
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Features
Data protection
This week, the Motion Picture Association of America (Mpaa) sent out a press release under the triumphal headline: '2006 box office rebounds'.The cause of this elation, according to the Mpaa, was the fact theatrical revenues in the US for the year - spearheaded by Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's ...
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Features
Language barriers
It is a longstanding tradition that the day prior to the Academy Awards, the directors of the films nominated in the foreign-language category take to the stage of the Samuel Goldwyn Theater and talk about their work and the state of international cinema.This year, the film-makers in question, Denmark's Susanne ...
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Features
Foreign affairs
The Los Angeles Times recently ran an editorial that put forward an argument for the elimination of the foreign-language category at the Academy Awards. Its point was that "foreign film-making talent is represented in record numbers" in all categories and therefore in no need of special support.The argument from the ...
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News
Daydream believers
Blood Diamond and The Pursuit Of Happyness significantly expanded into the international marketplace earlier this month. About six months ago, the marketing and distribution staffs of the films' respective studios sat down and weighed different release scenarios. Based on available materials and the timing of the domestic debuts, they had ...
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Features
Stand and Deliver
Some industry expressions are like adhesive plasters. In that category the one that I find most nettlesome is the one that insists it is a product-driven marketplace. On the surface it implies simply that the films themselves determine the size of the audience; the better the choices, the larger the ...
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Features
Staying home
There has always been a realm of movies where there is a tacit understanding that its inhabitants will not cross borders. Last weekend, local productions topped box-office charts in Italy, South Korea, France, China, Thailand, Denmark and Poland. The likelihood of any of these crossing oceans and finding welcoming cineastes ...
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Features
Worldwide - Fight for share
There is something innately arcane about market share statistics and yet they are a ferocious obsession for players in the film industry. Pies and graphs breaking down revenues in North America and in key international territories are not uncommon. But judging market share for the entire international market with a ...
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