athlone cinema

cena

whats the stroy with the cimema itsnot getting the top flims out. there is loads that have come out put they haven't come to athlone. so i now haveto drive to galway if i want to see the flim. like the new brad pitt flim that came out didn't even come to athlone. they may want to get there act together

Brando_ie

I remember looking into that when Bad Boys 2 came out and wasn't picked up by the Athlone IMC for about four weeks. My wife ended up chatting to a friend who worked there and apparently it went that IMC had an issue with the first run cost for some movies (a particular distributor IIRC, although BB2 was Sony and Ben Button is WB??) and only opted for the movies once they left other cinemas and at that stage the per print cost went down significantly.

I would guess it might be more of the same as I recall a few notable movies not coming into Athlone until a few weeks after they debuted. Cant really get to the cinema much since my son was born but it was terribly annoying at the time as IMC has a monopoly in the midlands so Galway is the only real viable alternative. Unless the IMC gets some realistic Midlands competition I would expect it will continue

Eireann

When a film company releases a film, they sometimes only release it into the cities ie. Dublin, Limerick, Cork and Galway to 'test' the water. If they don't do well in the cities, they will not send it down the country to the smaller cinemas.

IMC do have a fued ongoing, whereby Entertainment Films will not give any of the films to them. This has been going on for years and so films like SATC and The Golden Compass never reached an IMC or even some of the Omni's too.

Then theres certain films that the distributors want played in the larger screens for so many weeks at a time. Lets say film A was released and tied into Screen 1 for 3 weeks. Film B is then released at the same time and they too want Screen 1 for x amount of weeks. Two films cannot play together, and so if Film A is contracted into Screen 1, the cinema cannot contract another film into the same screen.

THEN! A lot of companies will want airtime in the cities, and so again the film will only play in the larger towns. When they have played it to death, the film distributor will then say 'Ok, now play it down the country'.

I think a lot of it comes down to distributors wanting as much money for their film as they can make. By playing it in a large multi screen cineplex, they will create more revenue. Lets say you have 10 copies of the film coming into the country. Why would they choose a cinema that can hold a max of 1000 patrons over a cinema that has a screen that can hold nearly as much, or a cinema that can cater for a lot more patrons? They just want their money.

baldbear

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Anderson

They had a disagreement with the uk distributors of films so now we don't get to see some classics. Cowboys, there all a shower of cowboys.