Projection Room: a star isn’t born at some cinemas... it’s negotiated

Legal note: the following views are those of TheJackSmit.com and not those of any employer or cinema chain

UPDATE: As of October 12th, Vue and Warner came to an agreement on terms to show the film- but it does still raise the question of whether higher ups are truly listening to customer demand.

This weekend has been quite an ordeal for customers to Vue cinemas around the UK- earlier this week, the company pulled every screening of A Star is Born at all of their cinemas, allegedly due to some disputes with the film’s distributor Warner. It’s about time someone escalated this.

From my understanding of the situation, both parties have failed to reach an agreement on the amount of screens the film will show in, and as I write this on October 6th, none of Vue’s 89 cinemas in the UK and Ireland are showing the film to customers, and boy has this angered loyal cinemagoers, and even some of the Great Men and Women™ who run these fine establishments on a daily basis. This is something I feel very critically about, because yes, I may be very closely affiliated with their Preston cinema, but at the end of the day, I am a customer like a lot of you readers, and I want them to show this film too. Someone has to call them out for their mistakes, and believe me, I ain’t just doing it on the feedback forms this time. Every other cinema in the UK are showing this film, so there have obviously been some major arguments within the so called ‘screen content’ team and Warner Bros, and the way I see it, this is a big loss for customers, especially as there is already talk of Oscar nominations, and it must sting even more if you live in an area where there are no competing cinemas.

The behind the scenes elements of this industry are brutal, every film has to be renegotiated for every cinema each week based on the box office and admissions data that provides the backbone to the managers of these chains, which is why you always have to wait until a Wednesday afternoon to start planning a weekend of big screen entertainment. But this is simply unprecedented. In my 15 years of cinemagoing, and my 5 years writing about film here for TheJackSmit.com, the closest situation to this I can remember is when Disney tried to speed up the DVD release of Alice in Wonderland, and infamously, Odeon declined the opportunity to exhibit the film in their cinemas (for a few weeks, then Disney backed down)- we could be looking at a repeat of that situation eight years later, but this time, it’s a chain that technically used to be owned by the film distributor itself (fact time folks, Vue used to do business as Warner Village Cinemas until 2003, when they merged with SBC International to create the current company we know and kind of love today).

And with a film as big as A Star is Born being locked out of the UK’s 3rd biggest chain, this could set an alarming precedent, as customers simply don’t want to see wall to wall screenings of Venom and even Johnny English. They want intelligent, thought provoking cinema- and this is where the multiplex idea fails a bit, especially if you’ve got less than 12 screens for example. It’s time for film buyers in all the main companies to start actively speaking with their audiences within the cinemas more, and gain a better understanding of exactly what plays well at each site and how audiences respond. Where I am based, we have two cinemas. One of them gets the better film selection. The other has the recliners. And from January, well, if this saga continues, I know where my custom is going.

So, readers, my advice to you as cinemagoers in situations like this is as follows: open dialogue with management (not the guys on the tills, they have no control on this and deserve your respect) at your local multiplex, and lobby them to take more chances on the films you want to see. And if it’s the distributor keeping a film from a cinema, the same process applies- because that’s how this industry works. It’s time to start making some noise and holding them accountable.