‘La piedad’ by Eduardo Casanova generated many Cainite-flavored headlines that tried to expose a resounding failure. Beyond the hoaxes about subsidies, there were headlines that compared the budget item with its collection, and, as we explained a few weeks ago, those data with numbers are useless without the factor of released copies, and not only this, but calibrating the details of those copies.
‘La piedad’ obtained 7,700 euros at its premiere or, what is the same, an average of 385 euros per room. Very little, but the truth is that not only those 20 rooms count, but also the number of sessions in those copies. Screen premieres are often a legal procedure to be able to distribute the film in the domestic market and move it across platforms. For this reason, the collection is not relevant if, for example, they have previous contracts to sell the film to Netflix, Filmin or even abroad.
Not everything is a matter of copies
This past weekend, for example, we had two medium-sized releases like ‘Irati’ and ‘Terrifier 2’, one of them has slipped into the top 10 at the box office, but the other has been left at the gates. Both had over a hundred copies in their distribution, but when you go to buy the tickets, you find that in the same cinema in the original version they have up to four times for the first, and only one hour for the second.
That is to say, ‘Terrifier 2’ may have 100 copies, but it is exhibited 4 times less than the Paul Urkijo film. The same has happened in that same chain of cinemas with ‘Till’, another premiere that comes out with 87 copies in which half the possibilities are offered than others of the same category. So, with fewer starting possibilities, access difficulties for your potential audience (and let’s not talk in the provinces), and an opacity that is impossible to count based on the limitation of passes, is it correct to speak of commercial failure in Spain?
What can be clear to us is that there is no doubt that it is not a success. So that the collection per copy is interesting, but in relation to a failure it cannot be considered until a balance of costs and benefits has been evaluated, including those that do not appear on the itinerary. The display model is no longer unique, so It doesn’t make sense to value exploitation based on people who enter a room when every week there are platform blockbusters that people see exclusively at home.
Cost versus benefit and platforms
This means that ‘Mercy’ can be a sweep when shown on a platform and can compete with Netflix’s ‘A Ghost Is Loose Inside the House’, managing to surpass it despite having 75 times less budget. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, but it can happen. ‘Midsommar’ only had 90,000 viewers in Spain, but it is a global success in all its formats. Still, failure in theaters is possible and depends on the P&A (Prints & Advertising) marketing campaign. for the launch and maintenance of a film. “publicity and copies.
These would be the costs of the press, communication, materials, copies, masters and dubbing. Now the DCP (Digital Cinema Package), which for the distributor means a cost of 60 euros for a single copy that can supply more theaters than before. According to Nacho Estrada, operator of the Spanish Film Library, It doesn’t even make sense to talk about copies, oops, not even those 60 euros are representative:
“When you talk to a programmer, he talks about copying when he puts the film in a theater. Either in 1 or 3 passes. It’s a jargon that hasn’t been updated and, indeed, they currently count by screens. They don’t throw that many anymore DCPs, since many cinemas receive them by “satellite”, that is, they download it to the projector from a general server where the distributors upload their content”
For this reason, the important thing in the exhibition is not so much to release the film, but the P&A. It depends on that total cost, it will make sense to have invested in 200 copies or 90, but always with the factor of the number of sessions into account. For this reason, the advertising cost of ‘La piedad’ was minimal, so the production budget is perfectly profitable in other ways. ‘Terrifier 2’ may find itself in trouble, which after a great bet has not found a response from the public, but even so, we must qualify this failure, since the screen passes have been minimal since the opening weekend.