Jurassic Park was an unprecedented financial success. It earned a worldwide box-office gross of $913 million and yielded millions more from cable, broadcast television, and home video. Revenues from merchandising ran to over $1 billion. Until Titanic (1997) surpassed it, Jurassic Park defined how large the market for a megapicture could be.
To a greater degree than earlier blockbusters, Jurassic Park set out to be a global hit. Two years before the film opened, Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment mounted a careful strategy with Universal's international distribution arm. They branded the film with a red-yellow-black dinosaur silhouette that would provide instant recognition all over the world. Publicists trumpeted the technical advances that had led to computer-generated velociraptors and gallimimuses (28.1). But, for most of the campaign, Spielberg showed no images featuring the dinosaurs. Months before release, theaters screened coming-attractions trailers shOWing only evocative bits of the background story. Eventually Spielberg released one image of a tyrannosaurus tipping over a jeep, but to see more monsters, audiences would have to pay.
Internationally, the film rolled out very quickly. It was released in the United States and Brazil in June 1993, most of Latin America and Asia in July and August, and Europe in September and October. This schedule ensured that Jurassic Park would be featured in the world's press throughout the summer and fall. France, the country that protested most loudly against Hollywood imperialism, was one of the last countries to see the movie; ironically, the opening-week grosses there were the highest outside the United States. After the film had played out in most countries, it opened in India and Pakistan, becoming the topearning western film in both countries.
Worried that he had missed some chances to exploit E. T. (1982), Spielberg coordinated Jurassic's tie-ins with great care. Multinational companies like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Shell Oil, and Marks & Spencer plunged in. Amblin and Universal assembled a merchandising team for each region, licensing hundreds of items, from schoolbags to dinosaurshaped cookies. A French computer-game firm spent as
28.1 Realistic blur for computer-generated dinosaurs roaming Jurassic Park.
Much publicizing the video game as Universal spent promoting the film. Relying on children's fascination with dinosaurs, marketing teams synchronized the release with special museum displays and television documentaries.
Universal drove a hard bargain with exhibitors, demanding larger than usual shares of ticket sales. But the pressure paid off. Jurassic Park widened markets for U. S. films. It helped break the hold of Hong Kong films on East Asia, and it showed that there was a large Indian audience for Hindi-dubbed Hollywood films. As the biggest film to enter the emerging markets of eastern Europe, it taught exhibitors western-style marketing techniques, such as blasting the publiC with TV spots, comic books, and souvenirs.
In all, the marketing blitzkrieg set a new standard for comprehensiveness. Some critics wondered if Spielberg was having a laugh on everyone. By using the film's trademark as the logo for the park in the story, did he suggest that very little separated the movie's world from ours? Were we in fact the suckers whom the lawyer in the film hopes to entice into the park? Was the movie just the last piece of merchandise in the chain? And when Spielberg'S digital creatures went prowling for victims past a souvenir shop featuring Jurassic toys, had movies reached the limit of product placement?
(1997), a British-made film funded and distributed worldwide by Fox. U. S. studios also stepped up the number of coproductions they mounted. With the 1990s boom in international movie receipts, studios wanted bigger pieces of regional markets.
One advantage in going global was that certain activities were less strictly regulated outside the United
States. Even when vertical integration was forbidden at home, the studios had owned foreign theaters and local distribution companies. Block booking and blind bidding, outlawed in the United States, were routine in foreign markets, and they continued into the 1990s. These practices carried even more clout with multinational media empires backing them up.
The U. S. majors had long protected their international interests through their trade association, the Motion Picture Export Association of America. In the 1990s, the MPEAA had branches in sixty nations, where 300 employees worked to increase the local market for the Majors. MPEAA employees monitored legislation that might create barriers to American media, and they lobbied politicians and government decision makers. Since the mid-1960s, Jack Valenti, the head of the MPEAA’s parent organization, the Motion Picture Association of America, had fought fiercely to limit censorship, to persuade U. S. politicians to look kindly on the media industry, and to keep Hollywood films supreme throughout the world.
Just as Hollywood’s grip on the market tightened in the early 1990s, Valenti faced rebellion. Film and television became flashpoints in the long-running negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, later to become the World Trade Organization). Nations signing on to GATT pledged to eliminate subsidies and tariffs, allowing other nations’ products to compete equally with domestic ones. The Majors fought to have films defined as services, which would have required European countries to cut their subsidies to local filmmaking and eliminate levies and taxes on U. S. movies.
In 1992, the French led a counterattack against any effort to include “audiovisual industries” in GATT. They pointed out that Hollywood already dominated the region; to dissolve the protectionist measures in place would virtually eliminate European film production. The announcement that Jurassic Park would play on one-quarter of France’s major screens strengthened the case against the Majors. The MPEAA fought hard, but when GATT was signed in December 1993, film and television were not included. The Europeans were jubilant.
The Majors tried to make amends by muffling free-trade rhetoric and donating money for European film education. Still, the next year proved how well founded the Europeans’ fears had been. In 1994, for the first time, the Majors earned more rental income from overseas theaters than from domestic ones. Meanwhile, films from all other countries received a still thinner slice of the world market. Variety’s headline ran “Earth to H’wood: You Win.”2
During the rest of the decade, all film revenues for the Majors rose, with nearly every year notching record returns. Overseas grosses were increasing faster than domestic ones, which only confirmed the belief that the global movie market still had room to grow.
At the start of the 1990s, the United States contained 30 percent of the world’s movie screens, about one screen for every 10,000 people. Most of western Europe had far fewer screens per capita, and Japan had only one theater for every 60,000 people. Since Americans visited movies more frequently than nearly any other people-four to five times on average each year—the Majors believed that most regions were “underscreened” and failed to tap the potential market. In addition, the studios and the U. S. independents were pumping out many films, but, in most countries, there were comparatively few places to show them.
Multiplexing seemed the natural solution. Because multiscreen cinemas had increased attendance in North America by reinforcing the moviegoing habit, observers reasoned that they might spur more demand in other markets. The advantages of many screens under one roof, a single box office, centralized concession sales, and other economies of scale would apply abroad. By increasing the number of screens, multiplexes would also allow more films to come in faster. As in the United States, where films opened wide and played off quickly, the distributors would benefit by getting a large share of the first-week receipts. Moreover, if the new theaters were more luxurious than the aging competition, ticket prices could be boosted. This was an important consideration in developing countries, where a ticket often cost less than one dollar. And, if the Majors owned or operated the multiplex, then they could compete with local exhibitors, monitor box-office receipts accurately, and control access to prints, thus limiting piracy.
The idea was too tempting to resist, especially since European exhibitors had already started building multiplexes on their own. Soon American firms launched multiplexes in the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Warner Bros. was a leader in the effort, often in alliance with Australia’s Village Roadshow circuit. Paramount and Universal launched a joint venture, United Cinemas International. Because European exhibition firms were well-entrenched, the U. S. companies usually partnered with regional chains. By the 1990s, western Europe was blanketed with multiplexes. The fever spread to Asia. Warners joined with Village Roadshow to erect a complex in Taiwan and partnered with a department-store chain to build thirty multiplexes in Japan.
Now Hollywood was exporting not just American movies but the American moviegoing experience. Snacks were adapted to local tastes, but popcorn, previously a
U. S. specialty, proved surprisingly popular. European multiplexes were usually on the edge of town, providing ample parking and adjacent malls with restaurants, bars, and shops. Some cineplexes went beyond the American standard. A Canadian venue offered a lobby with game stations, lounges serving alcohol, and a food court. Warsaw’s Silver Screen cinema boasted a bar, a cafe, and an Internet-access lounge—and the “Platinum Club,” three 100-seat theaters where, for a $9 ticket, the patron could drink champagne and nibble on caviar.
Wherever multiplexes were introduced, attendance rose dramatically. In the early 1990s, European box-office returns jumped after a decade of decline. Germany, which began building ’plexes in the early 1990s, had its biggest surge in attendance of the post-1945 period. Customers proved willing to pay more for a bright, comfortable, modernized venue. The Golden Village complex in Bangkok, with only ten screens, grossed nearly as much as all other screens in Thailand combined. Just as in the United States, however, multiplex saturation set in. The United Kingdom and Germany could not sustain so many screens, and East Asia’s post-1997 economic slowdown cut attendance there. By the early 2000s, many multiplex giants were trying to sell off their overseas theaters.
Still, in emerging markets such as Russia, eastern Europe, and Latin America, as well as in “underscreened” Japan, the multiplex boom continued. The single-screen cinema would soon be defunct. The future of mass-market movies was the multiplex, an entertainment center for the public and a profit center for major companies—many of them affiliated with Hollywood.
World History
