Today may have been our craziest day yet in the midst of this COVID craziness. We’ve done multiple pivots for this weekend’s release of Phoenix, Oregon.
Since my last post, almost half of our theaters have closed, and we anticipate more will close.
This means they cannot sell tickets and run revenue through their theaters for our “Theactical-at-Home” viewing option announced on Friday.
We decided that to avoid more hourly changes, we had to make the decision to act as if all theaters might close by Friday.
Therefore, we developed a revised “Theatrical-at-Home” set-up where we can sell directly from our website instead of on theater websites.
After a 10AM call to make the final decision, our team assigned tasks:
- update social graphics
- rewrite messaging
- reach out to current press & reviewers
- write a new press release
- call media contacts
- update website to add a buy link and affiliate links for theaters
- communicate new messaging with theaters
We hope we have tackled the main big-picture decisions so that as of Tuesday AM, all marketing efforts will be focused on selling the “Theatrical-at-Home” model.
One very important point is that this is not “day-and-date” which means a studio releases a film in theaters and on digital networks on the same day. Theaters do not share revenues for the digital sales.
We are sharing revenues with the theaters.
At the end of the day, we have a digital product we can sell for years. The theaters are being hammered by this world event. We can support them in one small way by sharing profits through “Theatrical-at-Home”.
New hashtag everyone: #theatricalathome
Oh, p.s. Universal stole my word — not sure you saw the news today, but Universal decided to offer this weekend’s theatrical films day-and-date. They said it was an “unprecedented decision”. The virus shutdowns are unprecendented, but day-and-date is not. Plus, unprecedented is my word. I’ve been using it non-stop since Thursday, and it was the header of our press release 3/13.
My other new favorite word? “Highly Irregular.”
You know what is unprecendented and highly irregular? Sharing digital revenue with the theaters.
I love that word. They stole it.
Not really, but let’s see if they steal the spirit of the real meaning behind it.
I hope that they do!
♡ Annie