Eric D. Snider’s Movie Column: What Is a ‘Cinemascore’?

Eric D. Snider’s Movie Column is a column in which Eric D. Snider writes about movies. It runs “whenever.” 

The Jackie Robinson biopic “42? made headlines for a couple of reasons when it hit theaters earlier this month. One was its box office haul of $27.3 million, which is the best debut ever for a baseball movie. Almost as widely reported yet perhaps more revealing: it earned a rare A+ CinemaScore from audiences.

CinemaScore results have become as much a part of box office reports as the dollar amounts. Studios also use them in marketing materials, quoting the CinemaScore in commercials and on DVD and Blu-ray packaging. But what is CinemaScore? Where did it come from? What does it want from us? Can it hurt us? Does it pose a threat to our children? I will answer all of these questions and tell you what to think.

Poll dancing

Founded in 1978, CinemaScore sends pollsters to theaters in a handful of U.S. and Canadian cities every Friday night to get audience members’ reactions to new wide releases. Viewers assign a grade of A (“or better”), B, C, D, or F (“or worse”) — no pluses or minuses — and CinemaScore calculates an average. They ask a few demographic questions, too, and stuff like “Would you buy this movie on DVD?” The results are made available to the studios, which pay “thousands of dollars a year” (according to the Los Angeles Times) for access to the data.

CinemaScore is primarily an industry tool. The company didn’t really even have a website until last year, and even now only paid subscribers have access to grades going back further than three months. But many moviegoers nowadays are interested not just in the films themselves but in the box office, marketing, critical consensus, and public reaction — hence the increasing prominence of CinemaScore in showbiz reports. In a way, we’re all industry tools.

Most movies get a CinemaScore of B or higher, which means most CinemaScores don’t provoke any discussion. But an A+ is rare: fewer than 60 movies have ever earned it. There must be some fudging involved, since “A+” isn’t actually one of the choices on the ballot. I don’t know what ratio of A to non-A grades a movie has to have for its average to be A+. At any rate, it’s rare, and an F is even rarer: only eight films have earned that distinction, and not one of them starred Martin Lawrence, so right away you know something is fishy.

Those extremes are what bring out the baffled or outraged Internet commentary — usually along the lines of “That crappy ‘Here Comes the Boom’ got an A?!” or “The brilliant ‘Killing Them Softly’ got an F?!” Or: The “Evil Dead” remake only got a C+! “Haywire” got a D+! “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” got an A-?! “Alex Cross” got an A?!

The tendency is to break into another chorus of that popular song, “Moviegoing Audiences Are Dumb and Don’t Like Films That Are Challenging or Different.” But while that may be true enough in general, it’s not fair to cite CinemaScore as evidence of it.

That’s because CinemaScore isn’t a gauge of how general audiences feel about a movie, it’s a gauge of how successful the marketing was. It’s also a reflection of the mindset of the modern moviegoer.

Stay with me here.

Every movie has an Audience. By “Audience” I mean people who would enjoy that movie if they saw it. Not everybody sitting in the audience is necessarily part of the Audience, you know? For a movie like “The Avengers,” the Audience is vast. It includes the millions who saw it and liked it, as well as the millions more who didn’t see it but would have liked it if they had. For other movies, the Audience is smaller. The “Twilight” movies appealed almost exclusively to fans of the books — a large number of people, but a narrow demographic. They were its Audience, and heaven help anyone else who wandered into a screening.

It’s the job of the marketing department to figure out who the movie’s Audience is; target those people; and get them into the theater. Marketing’s duty is to play matchmaker. Every movie has an Audience, and every Audience has many movies. The trick is to get them hooked up in the right combination.

Whence bad CinemaScores?

So when a film gets a devastatingly low score, like last year’s F’s for “Killing Them Softly” and “The Devil Inside,” does that mean those movies are terrible? No. Or not necessarily, anyway. All it really means is that the movie wasn’t seen by its Audience. It was seen by other people — the wrong people. The people who would like “The Devil Inside,” whoever those people might be*, did not go to the theater.

Sometimes the marketing department had the right idea about who would love the movie and simply failed to reach those people. But more often, a disappointing CinemaScore is the result of misleading or misguided marketing. You brought people to the theater by promising them one thing, and when the movie didn’t deliver that, they were understandably disappointed.

Also check out: 13 of the most misleading trailers ever made

“Drive” is a prime example. The advertising made it look like a slightly artsier “Fast and the Furious” sort of underworld thriller, with exciting car chases and Ryan Gosling, who in a parallel universe is Paul Walker. No doubt many of the people who saw it on opening night were drawn to it because of that. But “Drive” is not that movie. It’s much more serious and brooding, and it’s punctuated by shocking moments of extreme violence.

The CinemaScore for “Drive”: C-. Compare that with its overwhelmingly positive reviews and the fervent fan base it developed. Obviously there were people — a lot of people — who loved “Drive,” but on opening night, they were outnumbered by people who didn’t. If you promise me pizza, and I have my heart set on pizza, and I come over expecting pizza, and then you give me something that looks like pizza but tastes like beef stew — well, there’s a good chance I’ll be disappointed in the evening. And that may be true even if I normally like the taste of beef stew!

(Important note: I enjoy beef stew.)

George Clooney has been a victim of this at least twice, with an F for “Solaris” and a D- for “The American.” Viewers were anticipating a sci-fi adventure and a spy thriller, respectively, not slow-moving, contemplative dramas with little action. Sometimes when a movie is hard to pin down to an easily defined genre, the marketing department gives up, lies about it, and hopes for the best. And, to be fair to the marketers, sometimes people see George Clooney! Science-fiction! and make up their minds without going any further.

“Killing Them Softly” was sold as a high-spirited, darkly comic crime caper with badass stars like Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta, and Tony Soprano. It was those things — but it was also a scathing commentary on the American government’s reaction to the banking crisis. Audiences tend to be tough on movies that criticize America anyway, but especially when they’re blindsided by it.

As for “Evil Dead,” I can’t help but think that the bold advertising tagline  – “The Most Terrifying Film You Will Ever Experience” – worked against it. That’s a serious claim to make, especially for a movie that doesn’t actually even try to be “terrifying” very often. Bloody, yes. Scary, not particularly. If audiences had gone in expecting “bloodiest” rather than “most terrifying,” I suspect that C+ CinemaScore would have been higher.

Who likes it, and why?

So that accounts for some of the low CinemaScores. Where do the surprisingly high grades come from? Here it’s important to remember that CinemaScore does its surveys on opening night. Not the whole weekend — just opening night. People who see a film on opening night are, by and large, the people who are looking forward to it and expecting to like it. They believe — either through the advertising they’ve seen or through other factors (the franchise it’s part of, the star, etc.) — that this is a movie for them. They believe they are the Audience.

Now, if the marketing department has done its job properly, then opening-night crowds are indeed the Audience for it. You’ll have some other people there too — the semi-curious, the nothing-else-to-do, the first-choice-was-sold-out-so-we-went-with-this — and they may or may not turn out to be the Audience. But if the theaters are mostly full of people who are the Audience, those outliers won’t matter, statistically speaking.

This is why almost every CinemaScore is a B or higher. The people seeing a film on opening night are already emotionally invested. Normal people don’t go to a movie on opening night with an attitude of, “All right, movie. Try to impress me.” That’s more of a second-weekend thing, after hearing positive reports from the first weekend.

“Breaking Dawn: Part 2? got an A. Well, of course it did. Who went to that movie on opening night other than people who loved the franchise and were dying to see the final chapter? The same goes for “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (CinemaScore: A) and most Tyler Perry movies. The people who are most eager to see a film are the people who are most likely to judge it uncritically, to disregard any flaws it may have. That’s human nature.

“42? promised viewers an inspiring, uncomplicated, feel-good, soft-PG-13 story about baseball and race relations, based on a true story and released at the beginning of baseball season. It doesn’t matter how GOOD it is (which is subjective), there’s no denying it delivered exactly what it said it would.

It may be instructive to look at the list of movies that have gotten A+ CinemaScores. (That list is from August 2011 and is missing a few recent entries.) They include some categories that aren’t surprising: movies that went on to win Best Picture (“Titanic,” “Schindler’s List,” “Gandhi,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Dances with Wolves,” “Forrest Gump,” “The King’s Speech,” and “Argo”); animated offerings from Pixar or Disney (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” “The Lion King,” “The Incredibles,” “Tangled,” “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Mulan,” and “Up”); and inspiring stories about teachers and mentors (“Finding Forrester,” “Lean on Me,” “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” “Music of the Heart”).

But also heavily represented is a type of movie that I wouldn’t have guessed but which makes perfect sense now that I think about it: movies about overcoming racism. “The Blind Side,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “A Dry White Season,” “The Help,” “Ray,” “Remember the Titans,” and now “42? all got A+ CinemaScores. Again, while you can debate the artistic merits of these movies, it’s easy to imagine opening-night crowds floating out of the theaters on clouds of warm fuzziness, having received exactly what they came for.

Over at HSXSanity, Roger More analyzed data from the last few years and found that CinemaScores are fairly accurate in predicting how a movie will perform at the box office in the long run. That makes it useful to people in the industry. As for the rest of us, CinemaScore reveals nothing about a movie’s quality, or even really whether the average moviegoer likes it. What it does offer, though, is a fascinating glimpse into the sociology of moviegoing.

*”The Devil Inside” is an unusual case. Not only did it get an F from CinemaScore audiences, it got negative reviews from 93% of movie critics. The Audience for “The Devil Inside” is apparently very, very small, and might consist only of the people who made it, and their moms.

Categories: Columns

Tags: 42, CinemaScore, Drive, Eric D. Snider's Movie Column

The Art House: A New Column Dedicated to Movie Posters, Art and Design

EDITOR’S NOTE: I first became a fan of Brandon Schaefer’s work when I stumbled upon this brilliantly evocative poster for Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Samouraï.” I automatically bought a print – I don’t even remember making the decision, my fingers just *did* it, as naturally as checking email or dismissing a pop-up. It arrived on the most beautifully textured paper, I carelessly slapped it on the wall of my dorm room, and that was that. I was a fan. Brandon’s work has only grown more impressive in the years since. From Woody Allen to Ingmar Bergman (do yourself a favor and click those links), it seemed as if his lucid but unusually lush style could articulate the most beautiful part of any film, regardless of the shape that beauty took.

Naturally, I wasn’t the only person who noticed this, and Brandon is now regularly hired by the likes of IFC and Oscilloscope to distill their films into a single image. He’ll kill me for saying this, but he’s become one of the most talented in the modern world of movie posters, and he’s on his way to becoming one of the most prominent. His one-sheet for “Wings of Desire” is probably my favorite poster ever, and the framed 24 x 36 print I have in my room was the first thing my girlfriend and I agreed would come with us when we move in together this summer. From Fake Criterion covers to Mondo and everything in between, we’re living in a golden age of cinephile graphic design , and I’m incredibly proud and excited to have Brandon writing about the increasingly compelling world of movie art. And perhaps he’ll create a few new things for us along the way…

Without further ado, welcome to The Art House. – David Ehrlich

You know how the first episode of a TV show often feels slightly divorced from everything that follows? This will probably be like that. Except instead of Jon Hamm, you get me, and instead of “Mad Men,” you get the premiere of a bi-weekly column focused on film art. Don’t worry, you could’ve done worse. There’s a good chance, though, that if you’re reading this, you might actually care about the latter. It’s only natural: the last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in art for film, firmly carried forward on the back of an ever-expanding collector’s market (thanks, Mondo!). More than a decade of overly photoshopped floating heads has finally given way to a seemingly endless loop of unofficial works striving to put right what once went wrong.

But, this isn’t about that. Or at least not yet. While a space dedicated to film art would be remiss in not looking at contemporary pieces or trends, I’m hoping that the 9-5 that keeps me from living on the streets or joining a thuggish and immaculately coordinated gang of ne’er-do-well graphic designers will offer a larger perspective. Something that manages to be both entertaining and educational. Kind of like an old episode of “Doctor Who,” except the only thing here as weak as cardboard is my sense of humor.

Which is probably as good of an introduction as I’m bound to write for myself.

I’m a working stiff. A graphic designer who, as the saying goes, is no more well known than your average electrician. These days, I spend the bulk of my time on film related work, with posters paying a large part of my bills. Now, this would be the point where another designer might start waxing nostalgic about their childhood, dovetailing into a lengthy story of how their love affair with movie posters was destined to blossom into the life changing career now before them. You know, the graphic designer equivalent of that kid who played with an 8mm camera and grew up to be J.J. Abrams. No such luck here. The only posters you could get anywhere near calling my favorite growing up were for ‘The Rocketeer’ and ‘The NeverEnding Story II’.

One was (and still is) an incredibly well crafted piece of design that manages to make a film about a guy in a rocket-pack look even more thrilling than its already exciting premise. The other is what you hang on your wall if you’re six, love sweatpants and worship a white flying dog. What I do remember making an impression were the things I’d never covet, much less hang. One-sheets for “Child’s Play” and “The Shining” were just a few of the posters that managed to be surprisingly effective, even if they weren’t the most intrinsically detailed pieces around.

When art critics argue over whether or not graphic design has the power to change lives, I’m the hypothetical case study dragged out in support of “duh.” Not only did living in constant fear of pictures on large pieces of paper allow me to fill my word count in a column more than a decade later (did I mention I was so scared that I used to sleep within arm’s reach of a proton pack and/or a lightsaber?), but it instilled a unique, if odd, appreciation for what design can be: a big club with spikes capable of being wielded (thanks, James).

And that’s the type of work that fuels my engine: design that aims to make you look; work that says something, communicates honestly an idea or a tone or, in the case of film, a hint at what’s to come.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be conventionally attractive to do that, either. The poster for “…and Justice for All” calls out the hypocrisy of it’s own title; “Taxi Driver” presents an isolated man within the bustling, gritty streets of New York; “Dancer in the Dark” hints at Selma’s failing eyesight and the grim future that awaits.

Creating work that checks all of those boxes is a tall order, one I’ve tried to get better at hitting for some time. When I started in high school, I’d often wind up frustrated, figuring there was an easy way out if I just focused on making something look cool instead. This is what “cool” looked like in 2000.

First attempt at a movie poster. October, 2000

To be fair, that’s probably more than anyone could possibly hope for out of a sweatpants-loving kid with no formal training. Try and expand upon that years later with a little schooling and something more highbrow than Ron Howard’s “The Grinch” and you get an exercise in straining the phrase “too much of a good thing” to it’s breaking point.

I’ll be brief: my last semesters of college were spent designing posters for class based off of Tim Burton’s “Big Fish”. The assigned method of research meant breaking down the film from hours to seconds into an easily digestible infographic to get a feel for mapping out narrative, with the final poster leading into “The Five Obstructions”. Again, for brevity’s sake, this meant revisiting the finished poster five times in five different ways assigned by an outside party. That was my thesis, and while I can’t really explain what exactly I was thinking when I made these (although I must’ve had a copy of “Fear and Loathing” lying around at the time), I can say that this is what burnt out looked like in 2006.

Five different posters for “Big Fish”. 2005-2006

After a string of odd jobs involving delivering furniture and failed attempts at filmmaking, I sat down in 2008 and got myself into the habit of creating posters in my spare time for fake film screenings. There wasn’t much of a plan behind it: a steady job went out the door with a crumbling economy, and making something felt like a more worthwhile way of spending my free time than six-hour “Call of Duty” marathons. Plus, any would-be armchair design critics were bound to be a lot less hurtful than 12-year-olds calling you unspeakably horrible things over the internet for being unable to shoot straight.

Blade Runner and M, Friday Night Film Series, 2008. The Dark Knight, Feb 2009.

A lot of those early posters were fairly simple. Growing up in New England and reading Walden one too many times can do things to a person, I guess. Had growing a neckbeard been in the cards, maybe I’d have spent more time drawing likenesses instead of trying to be un-fussy with the ordinary, or the obvious. Who knows. But the posters clicked with some people: circumstance landed my work in front of the right eyes, giving me the opportunity to work on smaller re-releases. Years passed, doors opened on wider reaching projects, and I can now do a year’s worth of “Big Fish” work in under 3 days. (But I won’t. God, I won’t.)

Orpheus re-release poster, France, 2010. Lawrence of Arabia 50th Anniversary, Sony, 2012. Kes re-release poster, 2011.

Woody Allen sarcastically said that 80% of success was showing up, but he has a point: had there been a sizeable group of talented individuals scribbling away at their own alternate film posters then as there is now, I doubt I would’ve gotten the chance to make this into a career. The community was barely existent back then, and just “showing up” meant that at least someone was bound to take note, if only for the novelty of it all at the time. I got lucky, and have been fortunate enough to go from making my own posters for fun to steadily working on things that get more use than sitting in a special spot at the corner closet of my parents house.

I can’t say whether or not any of this work has the blunt, impactful nature of a big, spiked club – that’s not my call to make. But the process of getting it put together should’ve birthed enough insight about design, history, and everything else in between for me to try and make this column a worthwhile read for the foreseeable future. Assuming anyone still knows how to read. I don’t. Why else make pictures for a living?

See more of Brandon’s work on his website.

Categories: Columns

Tags: Big Fish, Brandon schaefer, Kes, Movie posters, SeekandSpeak, The Art House, The dark knight

A Long Column About the Length of Movies

On the matter of movie length, Roger Ebert has summarized what every filmgoer knows intuitively: “No good movie is too long, and no bad movie is short enough.” Or as the old journalism saying goes, “A story should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the important parts, but short enough to keep things interesting.” (Old journalism sayings tend to be sexist. Don’t blame me.)

The point is, it’s impossible to universally declare a “right” length for movies. Three hours sounds too long — but not to the people watching and loving Lord of the Rings it isn’t. An hour and 18 minutes sounds way too short — until the film turns out to be Date Movie, in which case an hour and 18 minutes is way too long.

The subject came up recently among movie nerds when it was revealed that this week’s new Winnie the Pooh film is a scant 68 minutes. And as it turns out, that includes the closing credits and the animated short that opens the film, “The Ballad of Nessie.” Winnie the Pooh itself, without the short and credits, is only about 55 minutes. For this you should pay 10 bucks?

I have an acquaintance who thinks in those terms. Why pay 10 dollars for a 68-minute short-and-feature when the same 10 dollars could get you the 153-minute Transformers: Dark of the Moon? Why, that’s more than twice as much value for your dollar! That is his reasoning.

To be fair, he’s a cheapskate who only thinks about money. But he may be onto something. At some point, a movie WOULD be too short to be worth a full-price ticket. Less than 60 minutes is probably where that point would be for most people, psychologically, though it’s worth noting that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (i.e., the Academy Awards) considers anything longer than 40 minutes to be a “feature.” Besides, it’s not like Hollywood is intentionally cranking out 65-minute movies on a regular basis in an effort to defraud us. Zookeeper was fraudulent, and it was 102 minutes long.

The first movies were all shorts, of course. What we’d call “feature-length” films were a novelty. Even the features that were produced between 1900 and 1915 were shorter than we’re used to now: Richard III (1912), the first American feature, was only 55 minutes; The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), an Australian picture that holds the distinction of being the world’s first feature, clocked in at 70 minutes.

Although features became commonplace by 1920 — America produced 682 of them in 1921 — they continued to be comparatively short through the black-and-white era. This fit with the way the business was run, though. In the 1930s, you’d pay your nickel or whatever for a movie ticket, then watch a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, and a feature. Usually it was a double feature, actually, with the B-movie (the less important one) serving as opening act for a more prominent one. The point is, there was a lot going on. Nobody was going to sit through a double feature where both movies were two hours long, PLUS the opening shorts.

Longer movies also cost more to make (duh), and during the studio era this was a major consideration. You’d have your prestigious exceptions — your big Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, 132 minutes) or Gone with the Wind (1939, 224 minutes) — but for the most part, studio heads wanted to crank ‘em out as cheaply as possible. The term “B-movie” thus came to be associated with films that were inexpensive, short (often 60-70 minutes), and not very good. They were just fine as the bottom half of a double feature, though.

Newsreels started to become obsolete as soon as TV news became a thing, and the studios eventually stopped making live-action shorts, too, with only the cartoons remaining. And what about the double feature? It went away. The 1948 Supreme Court case of United States v. Paramount Pictures had a dramatic impact on Hollywood, basically ending the studio system as it was then constituted. Prior to that, the studios owned the movie theaters, too, guaranteeing they always had a place to show their stuff, and making it cheaper to do so. (You don’t have to give the exhibitor as big a cut of the ticket sales when you own the exhibitor.) With this no longer allowed, the studios had to sell off their theaters and compete with each other for venues — which meant they had to make better movies. Exhibitors had the power now. They could choose which movies they wanted to show based on which ones they thought would sell the most tickets, and that forced the studios to start emphasizing quality rather than quantity. Production costs went up, the studios made fewer films, and the double feature disappeared.

Today, running times have settled into a fairly predictable pattern depending on genre. Cartoons tend to be 90 minutes or less, owing to children’s shorter attention spans and the painstaking nature of animation. (As computer animation has gotten cheaper and less time-consuming, the movies have gotten longer. The first CG feature, Toy Story, was 80 minutes; nine years later, The Incredibles was 115.) Somewhere around 90 to 100 minutes is the sweet spot for live-action comedies, too, less if it’s a spoof, more if it’s an improv-heavy Judd Apatow joint. Action/adventure films usually come in at 100-125 minutes, so do straightforward dramas. Your big epic movies and biopics are often longer than that, owing to the amount of material to be covered.

But just as we’ve all seen bloated, overlong dramas that didn’t deserve all the screen time they got, we’ve also seen outstanding shorter movies that didn’t need to be a minute longer than they were. Some examples:

- Duck Soup (1933) – 68 min.
- Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – 75 min.
- Dumbo (1941) – 64 min. (And we don’t see him fly until the last four minutes! All the reviews totally spoiled that.)
- Bambi (1942) – 70 min.
- Rashomon (1950) – 88 min.
- High Noon (1952) – 85 min.
- Paths of Glory (1957) – 87 min.
- Airplane! (1980) – 87 min.
- The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) – 84 min.
- Before Sunset (2004) – 80 min.
- Once (2006) – 85 min.

(For the record, Winnie the Pooh belongs on that list too.)