Been kinda mulling this over for the last six weeks. There was a story in the LA Times in June that AMC Theaters was putting a new program they had created on hold due to strong summer box office numbers.
The new program involves streaming concerts into movie theaters.
Acts including Bebe Rexha, Paris Hilton, Kim Petras and Maren Morris were lined up to test out the new format next week, as a part of the Girls Night Live concert series.
….This tech would allow artists on a remote stage to see, hear and respond to the theater audience, in effect turning your local cinema into a stadium, the companies said. Fans who purchased tickets have received refunds.
The series was initially marketed as a new draw to get customers to the theaters, but given the strong box office numbers so far this year, it’s clear the demand for theaters is already growing.
I have been debating if this was a good decision on their part. On one hand, you want to fill as much of your venue capacity as you can when the demand exists. Seeing movies in theaters is something people are already familiar and accustomed to vs. a live interactive concert experience that probably will need to be adjusted to better meet audience expectations.
My initial thought is that movie attendance is likely to ebb again and that it might have been smart to move forward with the concert series on a small scale to work out the bugs and get feedback so that it was more polished when there was a need to really promote it to fill theaters.
Now obviously I don’t know all the operational details of the plan. Part of my assumption is that the technology would connect theater audiences to a live concert happening in a large venue. If the concert was in a smaller, controlled environment where the performers were more directly focused on the theater audiences, running the concerts to a limited number of screens might not be economical.
The general basis of my internal debate is thinking about all the new programming ideas that popped up during the Covid shutdowns and how arts organizations largely shifted back to the more familiar programming approach they had been using in 2019. I am looking at AMC Theaters and seeing something of a parallel.
Part of me is hoping they are continuing to develop and think about their interactive concert idea along with anything else that might draw audiences when movies being released aren’t resonating with the public.
