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Regal Cinemas considers canceling daily newspaper movie ads

March 18th, 2008 by Scott Marks

PLITT THEATRE GUIDE
P.U., spielberg — I’ll meet you at the Round Lake 2…or the Cinestage

First the critics, now the box ads. It’s bad enough that newspapers no longer see the need to employ reliable reviewers to steer readers in the right direction, now they won’t even know what time to show up and where!

Maybe newspaper chains are correct to do away with their full-time reviewers after all. Regal Entertainment Group, which operates 6,388 screens in 527 theatres in 39 states, is considering pulling the plug on costly newspaper listings. Exhibition chains spend millions of dollars each year running daily theatre showtimes, and the loss of this steady ad revenue would be another devastating shock for the already suffering dailies to absorb.

Reuters’ Sue Zeidler was at ShoWest when Regal CEO Michael Campbell made a point that somehow never occurred to me: “Personally, I think that theater listings in newspapers should be free to us and also free as a service to the public, just like TV listings are. I don’t see a lot of difference there.”

He’s right. Since television is no longer free, why shouldn’t cable companies have to pay the same rates as movie chains to list their showtimes?

What’s Free TV?

The practice of not running ads on Mondays has been commonplace among secondary exhibition chains for years. In the late 80s, Cineplex-Odeon began the cost-cutting maneuver of staggering their weekly box ads. Never on Monday, always Thursday through Sunday, and infrequently on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Even before the internet one had to find alternate ways of tracking down showtimes on off days. The Chicago Reader’s free weekly theatre listing was frequently more accurate than the city’s two dailies. While dependable, the no-frills sheet of showtimes lacked ballyhoo. I used to study the Friday movie section like a handicapper chewing over his Green Sheet. It wasn’t just the splashy full-page ad mattes that caught my eye, but the smaller box ads that invariably included a grainy pressbook image from the movie.

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It came as no surprise that an upcoming study by Yahoo and The Motion Picture Association of America found that 73 percent of American moviegoers get their showtimes on line. At first I resisted electronic theatre listings. There was still the thrill of the hunt, riffling through newsprint to track down that night’s entertainment. Last year I caved in and bookmarked Yahoo! showtimes. No more driving around Saturday afternoon trying to track down an elusive morning edition for a spur of the moment matinée. Besides, with David Elliott gone I no longer read the local paper.

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