The Business and Politics of Trailers

And, predictably, I’m not talking about the Silver Airstream variety. Via the Movie Marketing Blog, here’s an Los Angeles Times article (reprinted in the subscription-firewall-free Seattle Times) on the secret world of movie trailer distribution:

Three years ago, Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, did what in Hollywood amounted to the unthinkable: He admitted to paying a theater chain about $100,000 to make sure that a trailer for Sony’s “The Animal” would precede Universal Studios’ “The Mummy Returns.” Blake, who declined to comment, was roundly criticized by other studios that feared he had set a costly precedent. But, in fact, industry sources confirm that many studios find back-door ways to reward theater chains, diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars of supposed “marketing costs” into a theater’s coffers, picking up the cost of newspaper ads, forgiving the cost of replacing broken film reels or giving an exhibitor a bigger slice of gross ticket sales.

Later in the article, there’s an amusing anecdote about Tom Cruise.