Media Warfare

It ain't just movies that cannibalize movies ...

If marketers didn’t have enough to worry about as they start to position movies against sequels in the “Star Wars,” “The Avengers” and “Jurassic Park” franchises, the videogame industry has some serious competition of its own. ...

“The studios should at minimum be aware of big game launches,” says Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities. “The biggest games all come out between September and November, and there are typically a dozen big ones, so fall movie releases have trouble avoiding some overlap. A medium-budget action film can get bowled over by a big release.” ...

At last year’s Visual Effects Society Summit, Illumination Entertainment CEO Chris Meledandri said that the feature film business is losing — or has already lost — the next generation of potential moviegoers. “The thing I worry about the most is the competition for young eyeballs,” he said. “We’ve got so many other competing forms of media and entertainment and content.” ...

Pay attention to historical trends, and you see that the entertainment pie is getting sliced up in smaller and smaller wedges.

I Love Lucy, Mash and other popular t.v. shows of forty and sixty-five years ago commanded 35% to 50% of the eyeballs glued to the idiot box in the living room. We're talking forty or sixty million people.

Today, with a larger population, high-rated network offerings are doing well when they hit an audience of ten or fifteen million. Numbers that were routine in the fifties, sixties and seventies are now seen only for big sporting events. Numbers that used to get a television series cancelled are now cause for rejoicing in executive suites.

And movie audiences? They've been steadily eroding for decades. Key demographic groups, the eighteen to thirty-five-year-olds, now spend way more time playing with their computers, tablets and smart phones than goggling at a 3-D film on a dim screen at the neighborhood AMC. There's lots more entertainment choices, but leisure time? It hasn't expanded much. In fact, it's shrunk.

Meledandri's right. There's lots more competition for our shortened attention spans. So movies and t.v. episodes that want their place in the sun, they better be really, really outstanding.