#28 DAYS LATER MOVIE DISTRIBUTOR UPDATE#

Sadly, NeffвЂ™s experience is indicative of a recent trend across North America, where itвЂ™s sometimes hard to tell exactly what DisneyвЂ™s new policy regarding back-catalogue films is, beyond generally making it more difficult to show classic 20th Century Fox movies in theaters.

вЂњOur Fox booking contact offered a very brief apology that she could no longer book repertory titles with the theater,вЂќ he says. He asked the theater to double-check with Disney to make sure there hadnвЂ™t been some mistake. It was a devastating blow: NeffвЂ™s homegrown repertory festivals have shown many older Fox movies, including Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Zardoz, the original versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Suspiria, and Phantom of the Paradise. When NeffвЂ™s requests to screen The Fly and The Omen were denied - via the Drexel, which handles the logistics of booking a programmerвЂ™s requested titles - he realized the rumors were true, and that he had to stop screening Fox films altogether. Some got calls informing them that an existing booking had been revoked. More and more film programmers and theater managers were reporting that they had suddenly and cryptically been told by their studio contacts that FoxвЂ™s back catalogue was no longer available to show. In the preceding few months, Neff had heard rumblings in his Google group of film programmers that Disney was about to start treating older Fox titles as they do older Disney titles - making them mostly unavailable to for-profit theaters. For this yearвЂ™s Horror Marathon, Neff wanted to screen the original 1976 version of The Omen and the 1986 remake of The Fly, two of hundreds of older 20th Century Fox features that became the property of the Walt Disney Corporation after its $71.3 billion purchase of the studioвЂ™s parent company, 21st Century Fox, was made official this past spring. Neff is the director of the 24-Hour Science Fiction and Horror Marathons that happen every spring and fall at the Drexel Theater, an independent venue in Columbus, Ohio. Joe Neff knew there was trouble when the horror films started vanishing.

#28 DAYS LATER MOVIE DISTRIBUTOR UPDATE#

Figures will therefore fluctuate each week, and totals for individual titles can go up or down as we update our estimates.Д«ecause sales figures are estimated based on sampling, they will be more accurate for higher-selling titles.It is, among other things, bad news for movie theaters that depend on repertory screenings to shore up increasingly shaky bottom lines. In particular, we adjust weekly sales figures for the quarter once the total market estimates are published by the Digital Entertainment Group. We refine our estimates from week to week as more data becomes available. The consumer spending estimate is based on the average sales price for the title in the retailers we survey.

The market share is converted into a weekly sales estimate based on industry reports on the overall size of the market, including reports published in Media Play News.ДЇor example, if our weekly retail survey estimates that a particular title sold 1% of all units that week, and the industry reports sales of 1,500,000 units in total, we will estimate 15,000 units were sold of that title. Our DVD and Blu-ray sales estimates are based on weekly retail surveys, which we use to build a weekly market share estimate for each title we are tracking.

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