(By Chris Lee,
L.A. Times, October 08, 2013)
The numbers said
"Kick-Ass 2" was going to do just that. Before its theatrical release, audience
tracking surveys estimated the superhero action-comedy could gross as much as
$25 million its opening weekend. Instead,
the sequel took in only $13 million, finishing far behind the civil rights
drama "Lee Daniels' The Butler" and earning "Kick-Ass 2" an
instant reputation as a flop. For
decades, tracking was used by studios to determine filmgoer interest ahead of a
new movie's release and tell marketing executives where to spend their ad
dollars. But now trade publications,
national dailies, blogs, TV newscasts and even drive-time radio shows share the
once closely held numbers with everyday moviegoers. Tracking establishes
financial expectations for a new film as well as an A-list star's ability to
"open" a movie. The estimates effectively declare a winner before the
weekly box-office battle begins.
But at a time
when tracking's influence on a film's box-office fate has never been greater,
chronic inaccuracies have led industry observers and some studio chiefs to
conclude that tracking may no longer be a dependable box-office barometer. With
a cluster of Oscar-worthy films soon heading into theaters, the pre-release
surveys are increasingly coming under attack.
"Tracking is broken. There's no doubt about it," said Vincent
Bruzzese, chief executive of the tracking firm Worldwide Motion Picture Group.
"It's been asking the same questions since 1980. It isn't predictive
anymore. And it doesn't cover the way consumers make choices anymore."
This summer,
several movies were damaged by inaccurate tracking. "The Lone Ranger,"
"The Wolverine" and "The Hangover Part III" were said to
have "underperformed" when they had openings at least $10 million
below estimates. All went on to sputter domestically after bad word of mouth
and speedier-than-anticipated exits from the multiplex. Even a hit film can fall victim to bad
tracking. "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2" opened as the No. 1
movie at the box office but is seen as having underperformed by grossing $10
million less than estimates predicted.
When movies
exceed expectations, they generate positive buzz that can increase returns.
Last weekend, "Gravity" took in $55 million -- $10 million more than
the most optimistic pre-release surveys indicated it would earn. Summer's
superhero film "Man of Steel," horror flick "The Conjuring"
and the thriller "Now You See Me" earned many millions more than the
tracking predicted. "You can say,
'The testing was great,' " said one respected studio marketer who, like
other top executives interviewed for this story, declined to be identified for
fear of jeopardizing his industry standing. "But you know in your heart
you don't believe in the testing anymore. And if you do, you're fooling
yourself."
Because of the
sheer volume of movies being released -- 660 last year -- as well as seismic
social media changes, tracking service executives say, pre-release audience
awareness and anticipation have never been more difficult to gauge. This is
especially true, experts say, for non-sequel films and films popular with
minority moviegoers, who can be harder to survey because they are a
statistically small and not reliably representative cross-sampling of
respondents. "To the extent you're
trying to predict turnout, share and revenue, it's a hard business to get
right," said Jon Penn, president of media and entertainment at Penn Schoen
Berland, the firm that operates the tracking service Reel Pulse.
Yet Penn defends
Reel Pulse's tracking surveys, pointing out its estimates are within 15% of the
actual gross 75% of the time. Other major tracking services are OTX, MarketCast
and National Research Group. Even with
tracking's accuracy increasingly doubted, it's such a dominant part of the
Hollywood conversation that none of its studio detractors interviewed for this
article voiced willingness to give up the service. Studios receive tracking information over a
three-week to two-month pre-release window. The estimates sample audience
awareness, "definite interest" in seeing a movie and the proportion
of respondents ranking the movie as their first choice, as well as projected
breakdowns by gender and age. Firms
crunch their polling results, comparing the movies with previous titles by
genre and release window -- "comps," in tracking terms -- to yield an
estimated opening-weekend gross.
But because
respondents must self-identify as moviegoers who see at least six films per
year, a sizable population remains under-accounted. Especially difficult to
predict is audience turn-out for faith-based films and movies based on TV shows
such as "Sex and the City." Citing
issues similar to those faced by election-year pollsters, some studio marketing
executives privately fear that tracking's respondents are not only less diverse
but have been over-polled, succumbing to a kind of survey fatigue. "The phone rings, you don't answer if you
don't recognize the call. And nobody answers the land line anyway," a
studio marketer said. "It's one of the real challenges."
Breaking away
from tried-and-true tracking methods, the research firm Fizziology measures
social media chatter about upcoming films across such online platforms as
Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and various blogs to help tabulate
pre-release estimates. "We don't
have to ask if you've heard of the movie," said Benjamin Carlson,
Fizziology's president and co-founder. "There are no mall intercepts, no
phone conversations, no computer polls. We're just organically measuring the
conversation."
Further eroding
tracking's market share, Rentrak, an industry leader in box-office measurement,
has partnered with analytics firm Reactor Research (launched by United Talent
Agency) to kick off PreAct, a service measuring audience awareness and studio
marketing efforts. Unlike tracking, PreAct uses an algorithm that takes in
social media buzz, "comps" and pre-release ticket sales to gauge moviegoer
interest up to a year before a film's release.
"PreAct is a course-correction tool," said Ron Giambra,
president of Rentrak's worldwide theatrical division. "You know
something's wrong and you have several months to fix it. With tracking, there's
not much you can do besides a Hail Mary three weeks out." And the field is getting more crowded. Google
released a study in June quantifying movie search queries to predict box-office
performance. The online ticket-selling service Fandango has developed Fanticipation,
a consumer interest buzz indicator that tracks advance ticket sales, mobile
traffic and social media engagement to index pre-release anticipation.
Additionally
complicating the tracking picture is the human misuse of the already
compromised data. Studio spokesmen
habitually try to downsize financial expectations for their films with their
own estimates, which often set the bar artificially low. Rival studio marketing
chiefs ritually inflate expectation for their competitors' films, in a bid to manipulate
the studio report card. "What's
unreliable is the people interpreting the data," said a high-ranking
studio marketing executive. "The studios are out there setting the number
low; competitors are out there setting the bar high. The biggest challenge is,
nobody has a vested interest in an accurate number low or high."
Bruzzese, who
previously oversaw tracking operations at MarketCast and OTX -- and who is in
the midst of a "seven figure" overhaul of Worldwide Motion Picture
Group's pre-release polling methods -- says the only remedy to faulty tracking
is fundamentally rebooting the polling surveys. To return tracking to its
original function as a diagnostic tool for studio marketing. "Right now, it's everyone's individual
interpretations of this art and science mixed together, looked at as 'How much
money am I going to do?' " said Bruzzese. "And that predictions game
has to stop."
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