Slaves to the Audience

One of the more exciting things about the entertainment industry is that despite all the work, dedication, time, and effort that all facets of the industry puts into their craft and their product, we will still always be slave to the audience. We live and die by them. Labors of love and art house films crash and burn at the box office, while Alvin and the Chipmunks becomes a billion dollar guaranteed cash cow. The industry has always catered to the masses, giving them what they know and hope the people will show up for. The same goes for television and music, there is a constant evolution that’s entirely guided by what the viewer is asking for.

I thought this would make for an interesting discussion when I took a look at the weekend box office for this weekend (September 16-18). This weekend something unexpected happened. In a weekend where there were three new releases featuring bona fide movie stars appealing to multiple demographics, it was a rerelease of a film from 1994 that trumped them all and won out at the box office. The Lion King saw a rerelease by Walt Disney Studios, hoping to advertise for the upcoming Blu Ray release. This isn’t by any mean new as Disney did this in 2009 where they rereleased Toy Story 1 and 2 as a double feature. With projections in line with the Toy Story rerelase, they were hoping for a 10 million dollar weekend. What happened instead was a 30 million dollar number one opening.

What makes this interesting is that despite this being one of the lowest attended years in history, mostly blamed on inflated ticket prices, and bad 3D gimmicks, people came out in droves to see a film that not only was released almost 10 years ago, but that over 90% of the audience had no problem paying for the 3D premium priced tickets.

This is to me one of those examples of the audience guiding the next trends. It is not uncommon for older films to get a rerelease, but to have audiences respond to one with this amount of enthusiasm shows what may be lacking in the current offerings. It will be interesting to see what the next slate of upcoming films looks like, and how it will continue to perform over the next few weeks. It’s to note that the rerelease was scheduled for a limited 2 week engagement, but based of this weekend’s success, it will likely be extended.