DALLAS — After Hollywood’s biggest night, we are following the Oscars with what we’ll call the ‘NOTscars’...a ceremony for the movies that may have served an important role even though they were not Oscar worthy.
In our one (and only) category: Most potentially persuasive short movie aimed at Texas lawmakers, the winner is…‘Good for Texas.' The production, which came out in 2023, featured a whole cast of Texas actors, including Matthew McConaughey, Dennis Quaid, Owen Wilson, Woody Harrelson and Glen Powell. It also had Billy Bob Thornton, who acknowledges he is not from Texas…but that he did play Davy Crockett.
They came together to illustrate how other states have become much more successful at luring film and media projects because they offer much more generous incentives to land those productions.
For instance, Georgia is notorious for not putting an annual cap on how much it allots for these incentives. Even though there is now legislative debate there about reining that in, it’s not uncommon for the state to hand out more than a billion dollars a year to bring productions to Georgia. By comparison, New York increased its annual film/media project incentive budget to $700 million and California’s is capped at $330 million annually.
Before 2023, Texas set aside just $22.5 million each year for these enticements, while neighbors like Louisiana allocated $180 million annually, New Mexico allotted $120 million, and Oklahoma budgeted $30 million.
Texas adds big money to lure productions to Texas
The actors appearing in the video to lobby Texas to grow its incentive program argues that doing so would not only grow the Texas movie industry and give the state exposure, but that the much greater sums of money being spent by productions that choose Texas would also support Texas, “electricians, drivers, carpenters, make-up artists, hair stylists, hotel staff, folks in the restaurant and hospitality industry, parking valets, and contract workers."
Their message was followed by a call to action to Texans to contact their elected representatives during the 2023 legislative session and ask them to support legislation proposed to up the state’s offerings to productions. Who knows if that star power helped it get done, but Texas lawmakers last year approved a huge increase in yearly production incentives from the relatively lackluster $22.5 million dollars to $100 million.
The changes, described here by Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, took effect at the beginning of September 2023. The rollout happened in the middle of large nationwide strikes by actors and writers, which put most big productions on hold. Still, six months later, the governor’s office reports 32 new incentive applications have been filed. The office says that marks, “A significant increase over this time in prior fiscal years when there were limited funds available”.
While we’re on the subject of Texas film incentives, since the program began in 2007, the state says the top locations for incentivized media projects have been Dallas County, followed by Travis County and Harris County.
What is getting movie watchers off their couches and back into theaters
Ok. enough about where films are made. Where are we watching them now? More of us have been leaving our couches behind and heading back to theaters. Ticket sales topped $9 billion in 2023. In its latest investor report in February, Cinemark labeled 2023 as the year the movie industry finally recovered from the pandemic.
The country’s third-largest theater chain is based in Plano, so we visited to find out what they have been doing to lure moviegoers back to the big screen. Part of the strategy has been to use the much bigger ‘ScreenX’.
Cinemark’s SVP of Technology Operations & Presentation, Adilson De Andrade told us they have been testing the concept since last year at eight locations, including Plano.
“And there is no better way to hear customer feedback than actually putting it there and letting customers come experience and hear their feedback or see if they are coming back to watch this content," De Andrade said.
If you haven’t experienced ScreenX, you can think of it as peripheral eye candy. There are actually three screens. That includes the larger than usual movie screen in front of you, augmented by what they call ‘wing’ screens that stretch up the right and left sides of the movie theater, all the way to the back. De Andrade explains it is, “270-degree viewing”.
We sampled ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and ‘Dune: Part Two’ in this immersive format. De Andrade says more movies are being shot now to fill three screens, instead of just one.
“We’re expecting to have 24 (ScreenX) titles in 2024," De Andrade said.
And more in the years after that, he adds.
But it’s a single screen theater they call the XD that has really been a moviegoer magnet. XD is a larger screen that stretches from floor to ceiling. And it comes with a supersized fleet of speakers.
De Andrade pointed out that there is an extra row of speakers hidden behind the screen, facing out to the audience. There are also extra rows of speakers above the usual line of speakers hanging along the left and right walls of the theater. And to (literally) top all that off, “You have two rows of speakers hanging on the ceiling from very close to the screen all the way to the back of the auditorium”.
That kind of emphasis on highlighting the audio experience in a movie means that there is increased focus on the audible aspects of a film from the very beginning of production, “They’re capturing the content to actually use immersive audio”.
A movie watcher can almost close their eyes and ‘see’ some scenes just following the audio that is moving around them throughout the theater.
Theaters are also appealing to your sense of touch now, with the use of haptic seats. The Cinemark version is called the D-BOX. The user can control the intensity or turn it off. The seat is actually choreographed to move with the movie. The seat can give the sensation of floating, vibrating, rotating, and much more. In fact, De Andrade says the seats can be programmed for more than 65,000 different movements.
This is a production now in its own right.
“The D-BOX works directly with the studios to get the soundtrack of the movie and the content and storyline of the movies," De Andrade said. "It feels like a ride, but with content to pull you through, to pull your imagination through…to guide you through your senses.”
In the D-BOX seats in the Cinemark XD theater we screened a string of trailers, including the one for ‘Twisters’. This type of theater has been a big hit with movie fans and a boon for the company in its rebound from the dark days of the pandemic and early post-pandemic when moviegoers were reluctant to return.
De Andrade divulged that the company has about 300 XD screens. That accounts for about 5% of Cinemark screens. Yet, he says XD makes up an outsized 14% of the screens where Cinemark customers see movies.
Brightness...and consistency
Finally, the projection in the Cinemark ScreenX and XD theaters (and on many of their traditional screens) is now done with lasers instead of Xenon light bulbs.
“All the D-FW Cinemark locations have been converted to lasers," De Andrade explains. The lasers “spread the light better across the whole screen. The laser light provides…more vivid colors, higher contrast, sharp focus.”
That is a big deal for Cinemark, he says, because the company’s projection light standard is 33% brighter than the industry standard.
How do they do quality control on all that throughout a sprawling global theater chain? It’s no longer set up where individual people are in each projection booth sort of doing their own thing.
De Andrade shared: “We have a control center where we monitor close to 6,000 screens worldwide. We pay attention to every single show time. We had over 9.7 million show times last year, which is about 26,000 show times every day.”
He says monitoring all the technical parameters of each showing allows the company from a single central location, “to make sure each one of those show times meets Cinemark’s standards of quality of presentation”.
Getting a 'taste' of the theater experience if you are still watching from the couch
Of course, even with all those attributes, many people are still going to watch at least some movies from their couches, even if that means watching on a comparatively tiny screen with puny speakers. But Cinemark has a footprint there now, too.
The chain offers delivery of its theater popcorn and other movie snacks. Seriously. They won’t share specific numbers, but the company says the offering has been very popular, prompting them to expand the option to many states. This might partially explain why that recent investor report on Cinemark’s 2023 performance included a new all-time-high for food and beverage revenue.