Notes to Mark Cuban on How to Get More People to the Movies...

Mark Cuban just launched The Movie Busiess Challengee on his blog. He's asking help figuring out how to get more people to the movies without spending $60 million on marketing...

My solution: launch a subscription service for the movies!

Here are the comments I posted on Mark's blog:

Here's my 2 cents for how you get people to leave their homes and go to the movies every week (at least) and make more money for everyone involved (including indie film makers).

1) Launch a monthly subscribtion fee model so people pay say $24.95 a month and they can go to as many movies as they want. (Use technology and photo IDs so people can't pass their sub along for free). Netflix figured it out: people are incentivised to watch as many DVD's as possible in a month or they feel like they are getting screwed. Thus they have incentive to watch more movies and explore new content...

2) The theatres make most of their profit off of the concessions anyway so they'll be happy to have more people in the seats.

3) Theatres should show more movies more frequently which will create a demand for more content. Have the theatre open 24 hours a day with all types of movies running continusously. Again, the theatre can make more money if the seats are full, and there will be a demand for new types of content (i.e. The Long Tail for film...).

4) Theatres can offer additional premium services such as preferred seating, drinks, etc. to increase profits even more.

5) Level the playing field the way (YouTube is doing and digital cameras are doing) by making it easier for individual filmmakers to get their films into a theatre for the public to view. There are tons of ways to do this: let subscribers vote online for what movies come to the theatre and when for example. The best content wins. (Digg/Delicious model).

6) The big studios will be incentivised to focus on developing more projects rather than big block-busters. It will simply be more profitable to spend money on content rather than marketing because having more of the better content will make them more money. If they change their model to investing less in many more projects, film makers will be forced to do more with less. The studios will be incentivised to spend that same $60 million on 60 $1 million films, becase the data (I suspect) will likely show they can be much more profitable making a rev share from subscriber fees, % of advertising rev and perhaps % of cencession and premium services fees x number of seats their set of movies fill.

7) Finally, cut the filmmakers and actors in on the success of the film. And not just the A stars. Put the incentive back on those involved with the film so they are incentivised to do their own marketing...

Let's figure this one out. I'm sick of the current system that's for sure...