Content area
Full Text
Sky recently broadcast the episode of The Simpsons where Homer, irritated by the stream of trailers during a rare trip to the movies, leaps in front of the screen and leads the audien in achart of "Start the movie NOW!" He is thrown out of the cinema.
If Homer thinks Springfield is bad he should try Germany, where I recently counted 42 minutes of ads before the movie started. The situation is not noticeably better in the UK, with endless MTV-generation clips whose message seems to be that girls are anybody's for the price of a shot of rum, a squirt of deodorant or the latest mobile phone:
The whole phenomenon of ads in cinemas is a fraught one. In the US, where cinema's lack of commercials used to be one of the things that marked it off from television, they began to creep in during the 1990s. Now California-based exhibitor Century Theatres (850 screens in 11 states)can use asa selling point the fact that it is the only major chain not to show TV-style commercials.
In France there is a distinct lack of give and lake, since consumer advertising is allowed in cinemas but films are not allowed to be advertised on television. This has attracted the attention of the European Commission, which argues that the playing field is, as a result, not level throughout Europe. But the French are, as always, mounting a spirited defence, claiming that TV spots win benefit almost exclusively the major US studio pictures and will be beyond the financial reach of smaller distributors.
All this brings into focus the revenue base of British cinemas. Distributors pretty much have the upper hand and can dictate highly favourable terms (to them, that is) for the latest blockbuster, meaning an unusually high proportion of the money flows back to...