The theater I would go to for movies has closed. The closest one near me is on the other side of town and requires driving in some of the most congested parts of Fort Wayne.
Right now, I don’t subscribe to any of the premium services. I’m not sure which, if any, to choose. I don’t have a lot of incentive to subscribe. My TV has been on only a couple of times in the past few months.
I discovered that they are showing Everything Everywhere All at Once in the local theater again. They had stopped showing for a couple of weeks but now it’s up again. They’re also putting it up at the prime time of 8:30. When I saw it before it was in the afternoon.
the-numbers.com reported that the number of theaters carrying it jumped from 170 to 1490 this weekend. They also had a big jump in the box office receipts. Including international box office receipts, the movie has already collected about 4 times more than it cost to make it. The income per theater hasn’t changed that much this first weekend, but the gross number are a lot better.
So far this year, it’s #1 by a substantial margin in the category “Top 2022 Theater Average at the Domestic Box Office”
I was thinking about going to see it again before it dropped out, but now I’m considering it again. I already saw Lightyear which is gone. I’d also like to see the new Minions and Marvel movies but it’s easy for me to decide to stay home rather than hit the road for a show.
Go see it! It’s really high energy, funny and touching.
The local AMC theater has been playing old movies for a few weekend showings. They have a couple different classics each week. That’s how I saw the original How to Train Your Dragon.
This afternoon I went to see the 1991 Disney Beauty and the Beast. They had it on twice today and the 2PM showing fit my schedule. I was the only one in the theater.
I don’t understand the economics of a movie theater. Much of their cash flow comes from concessions. They probably get money for the trailers that the show. They also have revenue from advertisers. Tickets haven’t been a substantial source of income for the movies I go to. Usually there are four or fewer in the audience. Is the fee for advertising prorated for the size of the audience?
In first run movies, the tickets are a big deal. Perhaps they just need to keep the doors open. It lets them make a net profit with the help of big movies while keeping the venue relevant by having a big selection that only few people watch. I usually go in the afternoon. That might give me a distorted perspective on how many are in an evening audience.
Perhaps the older movies are playing on behalf of Disney. It could be market research for their streaming service? Is there a corporate connection between AMC and Disney?
So, Beauty and the Beast was an ok movie. There were several songs. None of them stuck with me after the show. All of the characters were really rough caricatures and I couldn’t really identify with any of them. Of course, here’s not a lot of character development you can do in 84 minutes. I didn’t notice “adult” content that was meant to go over the heads of kids but be meaningful to adults (unless it went over my head too).
With 1991 being the release year, they could use technology to do some of the animation. I don’t think they did much. In the intro, you could see layers move as the perspective shifted on the trees; a good hint that it is cel animation. The characters were drawn primarily with cel techniques. A group of four or five animators were responsible for each character.
There was one place where you could see that they had help from computers. During the dance scene with Belle and the Beast, the stars, windows and chandelier were too complex to do as traditional cel animation. It was most obvious with the changing perspective as the camera went past the chandelier. I think the computer give the animators a starting point.
I noticed that this had a similar structure to the Aladdin that starred Robin Williams. The villain has a sidekick who is loud and obnoxious and is only played for comic relief. The sidekicks are throw away (and annoying) characters. There’s probably other tropesthat both films use.
It was a nice film for the AMCs A-List membership so that my only expense was the travel.
W. Smith 