A New Old Idea

About a month ago, a friend called me up, asking me if I wanted to go see the new Mission Impossible movie. To entice me, he told me that the showing in question was going to have a special preview: the first seven minutes of the new Batman movie. This probably would have shocked him if I told him, but that actually made me less willing to go see the movie.

Don't get me wrong, I want to see the movie when it comes out. But I want to see the whole thing. I don't want to see just the first seven minutes. But I can see why other people might. I keep thinking about the run-up to The Dark Knight. People were obsessively following every press release, and presenting the world with every photo of Heath Ledger as Joker with all the gusto of Colin Powell showing photos of supposed WMD sites in Iraq. Hell, I knew a guy who listed The Dark Knight as one of the best superhero movies ever made, months before he'd even seen it.

I thought about it, and realized that the producers of this movie are sitting on a potential goldmine, if they play their cards right. Let's say, for the purposes of this conversation, that the Dark Knight Rises is 140 minutes long (not too much of a stretch, The Dark Knight was 152 minutes). All they have to do is cut the movie up into 7 minute segments, pick 19 movies that may or may not do well in the box offices, and release the rest of the movie in installments. People will line up around the block to see the next seven minutes of The Dark Knight Rises. And they'll probably never stop to consider the fact that they're paying for one movie 20 times.

If you're saying to yourself "People would never go to the movies every week to see a short segment of a larger story," then you would be advised to look into the history of the movies. Theaters used to do that, and audiences clamored to watch them. They were called "serials," and were essentially the forerunner to television shows. Of course, now that we have television, people might be less eager to leave their homes for what's basically a seven minute TV show episode. But if something like the serial is going to make it's comeback, they could do worse than to pick something like The Dark Knight Rises to revitalize this concept. It's already got a devoted, ravenous fanbase. If the costumes I saw at the opening of The Dark Knight are any indication, the fans are more than willing to debase themselves publicly in order to watch a Batman movie. If they're willing to do that, I can't see why they wouldn't be willing to shell out 10 bucks every week for the better part of three months to see a Batman movie.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights