Is the digital projection they use equivalent to the projection you are comparing it to? My office projector that i use for powerpoint presentations would be pretty crappy in a theater too, and from what I’ve seen in digital projectors offered on commercial web sites they vary a hell of a lot. Maybe this theater is saving money on the projector as a cheap way to throw on some advertisements and ignoring theater quality. possible?
I didn’t even notice the See Attached! The firewalls at my law firm ate the attached .Zip file (zip files are bad in the workplace typically for security reasons) and instead i got a very small text attachment as seen below, i’ll email Michael at theatersforsale.com about resending the attachment to an alternate address.
[Filename: TFS BuyerRegistration 06.ZIP, Content-Type: application/zip]
The attachment file in the message has been removed by eManager.
Below is a response from THEATERSFORSALE.COM with recommended advice on how to start up a theater enterprise… Kind of hard to build up capital while working at a movie theater to learn the business.
In a message dated 2/10/2004 7:23:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
add_info: Hello, I am in the absolute beginning stages of my theater search, ideally in northern virginia is the location i am looking for. This purchase is still years off but I was hoping to eventually use a site such as this and was wondering if i could get some preliminary pricing information so I can set my financial goals accordingly. I just want something small, a few screens, so i can set up a theater in parallel with my law practice until the theater starts breaking even/making profit. my goal was to have it all digital and download the high definition movies as i heard the licensing was cheaper this way – any advice or ballpark figures to expect would be most helpful
Daniel – Thanks for your email and interest in TheatersforSale.com. The best place to start is probably by reading a few books… see www.bigscreenbiz.com and look at the bottom of the first page for links to the most popular industry books. Also check out the forums on the site and discussions of various topics from operations to finance. Also, If you are serious… I would also take a position in a local theatre as an assistant manager and quickly learn the business from the ground up. There really is not much to it – rent the films from the distributors or have a broker do it for you, then you have your ticket sales and concession income (very important). Oh yea… the startup costs can be pretty high – so accumulate some cash – banks are not very willing to lend money for theater projects. See attached…. and Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help…
I work at an intellectual property law firm. There are most definitely international trademark/copyright laws.. Depending on the film though it might not be covered, but if the DVD was made in the USA or legally imported into the USA you can bet it would be.
My expressed interest to DVDs is really based on the trend I see in home multimedia resolution over the past few years, from VCR to DVD to super bit rate DVD, there is an exponential increase in the received resolution at home.
My target date, if I really go through with this idea, would be 10 years from now minimum. If current trends continue I would expect the resolution to be viewable and crisp on at least a 20 foot screen by then, minimum.
As far as doing homework.. This IS my homework, i’m working 12 hours a day at a law firm and this is my pipe dream. I have emailed a few owners of independent theaters and gotten no responses, if you had any recommendations about specific owners with advice, please give their contact info or let them know about this thread.
Given the time frame, are you still pessimistic about digital or is it just a “wait and see” scenario?
Yeah I checked out The Criterion colletion.. Not too many good ones but a few were, like Chasing Amy, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Rock, Rushmore, Silence of the Lambs, This is Spinal Tap, and a few more obscure ones like Naked Lunch. Not bad, I wonder what some of hte bigger studios offer
Was the 35% based on some formula? I know they usually base licensing on venue size and all that.. And somehow i think Virginia is going to want a bite out of whatever profit I can get
What percentage of the gross did you establish with them? Was there much negotiation involved or did they make it seem like it was a standard deal? Could it be this simple with all similar studios do you believe?
So far, sounds good… DVDs will only get higher definition so going this route may save a lot of dough with start up costs. In reference to my Brazilian digital cinema article from an earlier post, the $150,000 start up cost for their software would not be needed, and eventually superbit rate DVDs will have the resolution to match any digital projector as storage increases greatly outpace resolution increases…
I had a similar inquiry, does anyone even know the nature of movie licensing? do you go to a production studio, a representative of one studio, multiple studios… who should we contact for information in movie specific licensing agreements?
looks interesting.. a brazilian company has developed a system of downloading copyrighted high def video in MPEG4 (DivX) format… a 5 gig DIVX compression would likely be around 1600 X 900, which is what most digital projectors can do (maybe commercial ones can do more).
Apparently the standard in the field at the moment is MPEG2 compression, at around 50 gigs a pop for a high def movie…
in either case there is only surface treatment given to the licensing information… apparently it’s still being worked out. Hollywood no longer has the “the prints are expensive” excuse and may need other justification for getting huge amounts for digital licensing…
The whole process of converting to digital is being retarded because of the expense of the changeover from film as well as the lack of a recognized standard in digital media.
ok, i guess george lucas hasn’t been too successful as of yet then. I definitely read a reference to a digital theater that was cited as saying it was saving lots of money because it did not need to order film reels and instead downloaded high def video from their website, i assume with a proprietary program so it cannot be redistributed.
Perhaps this method is not widespread but after Once Upon a time with Mexico, considering rodrigez’s total costs were around $30 mill, maybe it will be by the time i look into this more seriously a few years down the road..
I’m mainly interested scoping out a business plan for my aspiration of working till i can own a lil movie theater and “retire” to it.
Movie licensing is anathema to me though.. is it only a percentage of ticket sales? is it negotiable? i read one article which compared digital movie licensing with standard projector and said the rates were better but then emailed the person who wrote the article and asked what hte rates were and received no response..
i’m in the beginning stages of planning my movie theater 10 years down teh road or so and am looking for any kind of info i should know.
The “venue” i would support would be purchased years from now, and was intrigued in attempting ot establish a maintenance free, nearly worker free movie theater with digital media, control system to automatically play movies, etc…
so that’s probably more info than you expected but i figured learning about movie licensing would be benefitical in determining whether this could be profitable.
Is the digital projection they use equivalent to the projection you are comparing it to? My office projector that i use for powerpoint presentations would be pretty crappy in a theater too, and from what I’ve seen in digital projectors offered on commercial web sites they vary a hell of a lot. Maybe this theater is saving money on the projector as a cheap way to throw on some advertisements and ignoring theater quality. possible?
now that sounds like a good idea.. not to mention that new zealand is just about the most beautiful place on earth
I didn’t even notice the See Attached! The firewalls at my law firm ate the attached .Zip file (zip files are bad in the workplace typically for security reasons) and instead i got a very small text attachment as seen below, i’ll email Michael at theatersforsale.com about resending the attachment to an alternate address.
[Filename: TFS BuyerRegistration 06.ZIP, Content-Type: application/zip]
The attachment file in the message has been removed by eManager.
Below is a response from THEATERSFORSALE.COM with recommended advice on how to start up a theater enterprise… Kind of hard to build up capital while working at a movie theater to learn the business.
In a message dated 2/10/2004 7:23:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, writes:
add_info: Hello, I am in the absolute beginning stages of my theater search, ideally in northern virginia is the location i am looking for. This purchase is still years off but I was hoping to eventually use a site such as this and was wondering if i could get some preliminary pricing information so I can set my financial goals accordingly. I just want something small, a few screens, so i can set up a theater in parallel with my law practice until the theater starts breaking even/making profit. my goal was to have it all digital and download the high definition movies as i heard the licensing was cheaper this way – any advice or ballpark figures to expect would be most helpful
Daniel – Thanks for your email and interest in TheatersforSale.com. The best place to start is probably by reading a few books… see www.bigscreenbiz.com and look at the bottom of the first page for links to the most popular industry books. Also check out the forums on the site and discussions of various topics from operations to finance. Also, If you are serious… I would also take a position in a local theatre as an assistant manager and quickly learn the business from the ground up. There really is not much to it – rent the films from the distributors or have a broker do it for you, then you have your ticket sales and concession income (very important). Oh yea… the startup costs can be pretty high – so accumulate some cash – banks are not very willing to lend money for theater projects. See attached…. and Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help…
Regards,
Michael F. D'Onofrio
VP / M&A Specialist
I work at an intellectual property law firm. There are most definitely international trademark/copyright laws.. Depending on the film though it might not be covered, but if the DVD was made in the USA or legally imported into the USA you can bet it would be.
My expressed interest to DVDs is really based on the trend I see in home multimedia resolution over the past few years, from VCR to DVD to super bit rate DVD, there is an exponential increase in the received resolution at home.
My target date, if I really go through with this idea, would be 10 years from now minimum. If current trends continue I would expect the resolution to be viewable and crisp on at least a 20 foot screen by then, minimum.
As far as doing homework.. This IS my homework, i’m working 12 hours a day at a law firm and this is my pipe dream. I have emailed a few owners of independent theaters and gotten no responses, if you had any recommendations about specific owners with advice, please give their contact info or let them know about this thread.
Given the time frame, are you still pessimistic about digital or is it just a “wait and see” scenario?
Yeah I checked out The Criterion colletion.. Not too many good ones but a few were, like Chasing Amy, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Rock, Rushmore, Silence of the Lambs, This is Spinal Tap, and a few more obscure ones like Naked Lunch. Not bad, I wonder what some of hte bigger studios offer
Was the 35% based on some formula? I know they usually base licensing on venue size and all that.. And somehow i think Virginia is going to want a bite out of whatever profit I can get
What percentage of the gross did you establish with them? Was there much negotiation involved or did they make it seem like it was a standard deal? Could it be this simple with all similar studios do you believe?
So far, sounds good… DVDs will only get higher definition so going this route may save a lot of dough with start up costs. In reference to my Brazilian digital cinema article from an earlier post, the $150,000 start up cost for their software would not be needed, and eventually superbit rate DVDs will have the resolution to match any digital projector as storage increases greatly outpace resolution increases…
I had a similar inquiry, does anyone even know the nature of movie licensing? do you go to a production studio, a representative of one studio, multiple studios… who should we contact for information in movie specific licensing agreements?
I just found this link :
View link
and more specifically
View link
and
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0205/p07s01-woam.html
looks interesting.. a brazilian company has developed a system of downloading copyrighted high def video in MPEG4 (DivX) format… a 5 gig DIVX compression would likely be around 1600 X 900, which is what most digital projectors can do (maybe commercial ones can do more).
Apparently the standard in the field at the moment is MPEG2 compression, at around 50 gigs a pop for a high def movie…
in either case there is only surface treatment given to the licensing information… apparently it’s still being worked out. Hollywood no longer has the “the prints are expensive” excuse and may need other justification for getting huge amounts for digital licensing…
The whole process of converting to digital is being retarded because of the expense of the changeover from film as well as the lack of a recognized standard in digital media.
Wait and see i guess?
ok, i guess george lucas hasn’t been too successful as of yet then. I definitely read a reference to a digital theater that was cited as saying it was saving lots of money because it did not need to order film reels and instead downloaded high def video from their website, i assume with a proprietary program so it cannot be redistributed.
Perhaps this method is not widespread but after Once Upon a time with Mexico, considering rodrigez’s total costs were around $30 mill, maybe it will be by the time i look into this more seriously a few years down the road..
I’m mainly interested scoping out a business plan for my aspiration of working till i can own a lil movie theater and “retire” to it.
Movie licensing is anathema to me though.. is it only a percentage of ticket sales? is it negotiable? i read one article which compared digital movie licensing with standard projector and said the rates were better but then emailed the person who wrote the article and asked what hte rates were and received no response..
i’m in the beginning stages of planning my movie theater 10 years down teh road or so and am looking for any kind of info i should know.
The “venue” i would support would be purchased years from now, and was intrigued in attempting ot establish a maintenance free, nearly worker free movie theater with digital media, control system to automatically play movies, etc…
so that’s probably more info than you expected but i figured learning about movie licensing would be benefitical in determining whether this could be profitable.