How does movies unlimited make money

how does movies unlimited make money

Click ‘spoiler’ after posting something to give it a spoiler tag! The post will then be hidden like. Twas the butler! Discussion How do different movie studio’s make money off unlimited cards? I often see about movies a month so it ends up paying for its self i just often wonder how that money gets distributed towards the different studio’s. Most likely the movie studio gets the exact same cut of every movie you go see.

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MoviePass is all but dead. It does appear that this is how things are playing out. Two years ago, MoviePass pioneered the concept of all-you-can-eat movie-going subscriptions. And thanks for that. There’s fine print of course. You have to be at least 16 to enroll, and you need to show your ID when you pick up your ticket. New members must sign up for at least three months initially. And prices are subject to change though AMC guarantees 90 days’ advance notice. AMC also has a tiered membership charging a bit more for the right to see movies in additional states. All in all, though, it’s still a pretty sweet deal. Not quite as good a deal as what MoviePass was offering initially — potentially twice as many movies, for half the price — but MoviePass’s quick spiral toward bankruptcy forced it to curtail its benefits after only a few months of operation, negating those advantages. Indeed, the , subscribers AMC has amassed through Stubs A-List have successfully seen some 20 million films over the past year. One imagines they may also have generated sales of potentially 20 million tubs of popcorn, sold 20 million Cokes, and moved 20 million boxes of Raisinets through AMC concession stands. How long can that last, though, in the face of heightened competition? And true to its name, Regal’s plan is truly «unlimited,» allowing members to see as many movies as they want, whenever they want. It’s a true all-you-can-eat deal, as opposed to AMC’s 3-a-week subscription plan. Like AMC’s plan, it requires a minimum subscription length — though a whole year, as opposed to AMC’s three-month requirement. And like AMC, Regal reserves the right to raise its prices, though not during that initial one-year subscription period. On the surface, Regal’s new plan thus appears to mimic AMC’s, but with several significant tweaks that may combine to give Regal an advantage. For example, instead of bundling IMAX, 3D, and other premium movie-viewing formats within its base price, Regal’s plan opts for a low base price on traditional 2D movies, supplemented by surcharges for customers who want to buy the extras. If it turns out that folks signing up for movie subscriptions are bargain hunters — a reasonable assumption, in my view — this could play to Regal’s advantage. On the plus side, it appears that, contrary to rumors that have been floating around, Regal will not be requiring Regal Unlimited members to pay for a full year in advance. Rather, monthly payment will be standard. Prepayment for the year, however, rolls sales tax on the plan into the base plan price. If you ask me, this could be the «killer app» that enables Regal to catch up to AMC after allowing its rival to romp unopposed to a one-year, ,subscriber lead over the past year. Still, there’s a lot of lost ground Regal has to make up. Let’s see if this pony can still come from behind to win. Jul 30, at PM.

What is the Regal Unlimited Subscription Pass?

MoviePass makes it all really easy. But for many people I spoke to, excitement about the deal is mixed with a good dose of suspicion. What’s the catch? As someone who has been a MoviePass subscriber for the better part of the past two years, I understood the gym membership model that they employed. Even if I only see one movie during the entire month, there’s not much left over from my monthly fee for MoviePass to keep. Indeed, since I first wrote about the new plan, I’ve received a flood of questions from people who are intrigued by the service, but simply don’t understand how it could really work. The short answer is, it’s not clear if the company actually does make money. Because the company is after something much more valuable than your monthly fee: your data. With a new price-point designed to attract as many subscribers as possible, MoviePass is hoping to attract a large enough user base so as to be able to monetize it. A few of the MoviePass-eligible theaters near Business Insider’s offices. Farnsworth envisions movie studios using MoviePass’ valuable data to do targeted marketing for their films. Once MoviePass has millions of subscribers, its ability fill seats can make the difference between a hit movie or a flop, he explained. When MoviePass still had a gym-style membership and was flying under-the-radar with only 20, subscribers, AMC Theatres tolerated the partnership. But when the subscription service announced its dirt-cheap rate on Tuesday, the theater chain spoke out. In short, the theater giant is worried that MoviePass will go bankrupt before it is able to turn a profit, and that when it’s gone, its subscribers will have developed an expectation that a visit to the theater should cost next-to-nothing. And with customers able to see more movies due to the unlimited service, it means more money in theaters’ coffers. Whether or not this cheap, utopian future comes to fruition remains to be seen. But for now, you may as well see some movies. You can read more about MoviePass on Wired and Variety.


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This is an article I have wanted to research and write for a long, long time. I finally had a moment to sit down and crunch the numbers — I hope it helps in the understanding of Hollywood economics. Almost as long as there have been movies, Hollywood has relied on huge-scale productions to bring in the big bucks. The Extra-Terrestrial As the films have grown, so too have the spoils on offer.

The starting point for working out the final costs of releasing a movie is to look at how much it cost the studio to shoot the film i. This includes…. Budgets have been rising in recent decades, well above inflation. In the following ten years this rose to The information available online is normally a mix of true figures which have leaked and educated guesses by industry experts.

The studios often try to hide the true cost of a movie, in order to make themselves seem thriftier, smarter or more in control than they actually are. I performed a quick check for the 29 blockbusters I have inside data on compared with their budgets listed on Wikipedia. Some of the other costs involved in making and releasing a film include…. To give you a little more detail and context, below are some notes on each of the main cost areas….

Judging the correct number of prints and units to manufacture is a key part of the planning done by the studios. If they order too few then cinemas and stores will have to turn away customers in the all-important first few weeks of release.

If they over-order then their costs increase and they are left with annoyed cinema owners and large quantities of unsold units. Giving these people a share of the income is a good way for the studio to hedge against poor box office performance and it also defers the moment they have to pay up.

On the flipside, studios have got rather good at using creative accounting techniques to show that they made a loss on paper in order to get out of paying such fees. Fortunately, Hollywood is rather good at squeezing every penny out of a movie, ensuring that the target customer is given many chances to pay to see it.

Movies may start in cinemas but they are far from the only place they earn money. Each stage at which a movie reaches a new type of platform i.

Of the 29 Hollywood blockbuster movies I studied, 14 generated a profit and 15 lost money. Note: The following discussion of profit uses this formula: all revenue received by the studios from a particular movie minus all costs they internally attribute to that production.

The smallest movies within my dataset i. Would you have made a smart investment? And I am sure this is a fairly low return for that kind of cash. The only problem is — how do you spot the hits? Hollywood currently employs the smartest, best informed and most profit-focused people in an effort to exclusively make profitable movies and yet half of their movies lose money. In fact, their combined best efforts only produce a 3. Yes, but only by a very small margin. The average Metacritic score i.

Similarly, IMDb audiences rated the profitable films an average of 6. How does movies unlimited make money, we can say that, yes, movies with the biggest marketing budgets do seem to gross the highest amounts at the box office.

Added to this, studios are less likely to make missteps on their home turf as they can be on-hand to scrutinise everything to a greater extent. Well, it depends on which part of the process you look at. Below you can see the origin of revenue and costs for the blockbusters in my dataset.

As you can see, the majority of the money collected at the box office does indeed come from countries outside of the US and Canada. However, studios spend a higher proportion of their marketing money in North America. This could be for a number of reasons including the higher cost of advertising in America, the temptation to spend more in the country which studio execs actually live in and because the US is often the first place a movie is released and the media enjoy reporting on huge opening weekends and decrying massive flops.

Together, they mean that only 12 of my 29 movies made money at the domestic box office, whereas 20 made money at the international box office. Alongside this, the losses at the domestic theatrical market were much worse than internationally.

So Hollywood looks to the international market with glee because…. Q4: Is there a rule of thumb for guessing which Hollywood blockbusters are in profit? They reached this conclusion by studying the full financial records of the movies they were involved with and also checking their hypothesis with independent professional film financiers. Using this rule, I was able to correctly identify all of the profit-making films and correctly identify ten as loss-making, however, this system incorrectly marked five loss-making movies as being profitable.

Not as reliable as one might have liked and way below the accuracy the BFI found when the rule is applied to smaller films but certainly interesting. So there you have it — a rather long sorry!

The biggest question some readers may have at this stage is — how did he get this data? I was also helped by a few well-placed friends in the industry who were able to fill in the blanks and confirm the veracity of some of the data points. I am completely confident that the information in this article is a true representation of how these Hollywood blockbusters make money.

The purpose of this site is educational and my sole intention is to help explain how our industry works. In the past, I have been contacted by lawyers for various companies, trying to prevent the sharing of key data points relating to their business. So far, I have managed to avoid lawsuits and also to avoid having to take any articles down, but if I were to offer the full figures as a download or details of how to do the same piecing together I have then I suspect I would get the wrong kind of attention.

So, if you want to know any more about these movies, please add your question in the comments. Very informative and great info as. Thank you, Stephen for some scintillating reading. When is someone offering you a book deal? Great work Stephen — thank you. And related to this can you demystify the roles, contributions and compensation for these various kinds of producers? Very helpful. Re the query on books sinceour volumes Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood 2 are more recent than the one.

They are also available in Chinese, Turkish, and Spanish. Stephen, please, please put all of this marvellous stuff in a book. Thank you for this amazing work! Can you clarify here? Thanks. Marketing and avertsing are not included, save maybe for the on-set photographer and a publicist who shows journalists around the set.

This is particularly important for things like tax incentives, which almost never include publicity and distribution costs when calculating how big the budget is. Both have a how does movies unlimited make money claim to be correct.

The budget is a real document created in pre-production which covers the cost of physically making the film. Before internet streaming as we know it now, Pay Per View PPV was commonplace, in hotel rooms and on encrypted satellite and cable channels.

As VOD has grown up, the newer services have become their own new window but the old way of accounting for the older services were retained. So strictly, the idea of digital delivery of video on demand to the viewer appears within three windows!

Just two questions about the average costs graph: 1. Instead of being included in costs? The opacity occurs for a number of reasons but most are to do with hiding embarrassing or unattractive practices, because they can and because there is no benefit from being open. Wow Stephen. Scary stuff. I want to break down the costs and show how they differ between products. Thank you Steve for your informative article. The research that went into it must have been enormous as it covered so much of the movie business including distribution.

I was really interested in the DVD sales figures and the overseas theatrical markets as the advertising would be. Thank you for your info!!! Michael L Edwards. Can you say the swing on that? Stephen, thank you for your informative detailed article. This is the sort of thing the internet would ideally be used for, instead of widespread trolling. Keep up the good work. Thank you for the information and the analysis you have performed. The real numbers are never released, nor should.

Nobody in the industry pays those numbers. At the end of the day, the important numbers and analyses come from what the windows revenue figures are and their relationships. As for profits… do magicians reveal their tricks?

Hey Adrian. Glad you found it useful. This allowed me to compare the true cost to that of the public figure in this case from Wikipedia. Hi Stephen, thanks for the excellent analysis. Do you have any data to support or contradict these numbers?

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The Regal Unlimited subscription will allow users, who must pay a monthly or yearly fee, to see as many movies as they want at Regal theaters, according to Regal’s website. Crown Club memberships are free. You have to sign up for the subscription through the Regal app and provide a photo of yourself when you do so, according to Regal’s website. Each annual plan will be automatically cancelled after one year. You can also earn Crown Club credits through the money you spend on Regal Unlimited, according to Regal’s website. You can make up to three ticket unlimitted at a time with the Regal Unlimited plan. After three, you must attend one of them before you can make another reservation. Maggie Jones. Regal Unlimited hoq launch in less than a week, according to Monet. Here’s a breakdown of the three available plans. You can watch standard format movies at more than Regal theaters nationwide. You can watch standard format movies at more than theaters nationwide. Regal Odes has two plan options: the monthly plan and the annual plan. The navigation could not be loaded.

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