“At their core, these Twitter-generated film concepts evince a desire for representation beyond Hollywood’s limited, predominantly white imagination. But while Black Twitter continues to be an unprecedented vehicle for creativity—and, increasingly, a reliable form of audience focus-testing for Hollywood—can a viral fancasting phenomenon like this realistically change the industry’s status quo?”
Category: AUDIENCE
A Musical Plays For Thousands, Deep In The Dakota Badlands
Laura Collins-Hughes travels to western North Dakota to see The Medora Musical, “a spangled summertime revue performed in an amphitheater carved into the side of a butte, with the Badlands as its backdrop. Part country music jamboree, part variety show, it’s a wholesome cousin to the loosely scripted entertainment you find at theme parks … The crowds have been coming since 1965, and when this season wraps up on Sept. 9, the producers expect attendance for 2017 to have passed 116,000.”
Interesting: Gen Z Students Share Behavior Traits With Adult Students
“Like their adult learner counterparts, Gen Z students attend college in order to get jobs and advance their careers. A 2015 study by Barnes & Noble College showed that the number one factor in choosing a college is career preparation. They lean toward practical degrees that lead to financial stability—even if that means leaving behind a more attractive but less career-oriented degree.”
Five Degrees Of Liking – How Netflix Is Using Viral Affinity To Understand Its Audience
The Defenders provides Netflix with a unique case study. Instead of merely allowing it to find out if someone who likes, say, House of Cards also will like Daredevil (yes, BTW), it tells them which of the people who landed on Daredevilbecause of House of Cards will make the jump to The Defenders.
Liberation From Cable TV? We’re Not Really Quite There Yet
Cutting the cord is absolutely right for some people. Lots of people, maybe. But it’s not that cheap, and it’s not that easy, and there’s not much hope of improvement on either front any time soon.
This Summer’s Movie Box Office Is Dramatically Down. But There’s Good News?
Movie ticket sales in North America are running roughly half a billion dollars behind last summer’s box office, making this one of lowest-grossing summers in years. The 12.4 per cent downturn comes at a critical juncture for Hollywood, with constantly swirling fears about the impact of streaming, television and the bazillion other entertainment options out there.
Theatre Wants To Let Non-Theatre-Attenders Help Determine Its Programming
“Called the Visionari scheme, the initiative is looking for 20 people who are “regular, irregular and importantly non-theatre attenders”. The advisory group will spend a year learning about the theatre through workshops led by the venue’s staff. After the initial year the group will begin to guide, challenge and inform programming decisions at the theatre.”
Study: How Our Creativity Changes As We Get Older
“How does the ability to come up with unusual ideas change as we grow older? Does it begin to flag in adolescence? Before then? To investigate these questions, we and our colleagues recently conducted several experiments, which we relate in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”
Study: Millennials Don’t Watch, Don’t Like, Classic Movies
A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s. Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films “boring.”
MoviePass Is Trying To Be The Netflix Of Movie Theatres. It’s A Daft Plan. (Or Is It?)
“AMC has come out guns blazing, even going so far as to include a solid alchemy burn in its press release trashing the company’s plan. As AMC points out, MoviePass — which buys tickets directly from the exhibitors, then redistributes them to its subscribers by way of a MoviePass-specific debit card — will lose money on every customer who sees more than one movie a month. So what’s MoviePass’s angle here? Is this a strange form of cinematic philanthropy? Or do they have a plan?”