Conjuring a Box Office Success

THE CONJURING opened this week in Philippine cinemas, and it seems that it is garnering such hype, promising strong numbers at the box office. I watched the movie on its opening day, this Wednesday; at a theater that was packed with audiences, so much so that we did not get to sit at our usual favorite spot. I was actually impressed as to how Warner Brothers Philippines seem to have played their cards with the local release of this movie. The Conjuring opened in US theaters last week of July. And from that time, with its blitzkrieg success at the US box office, there had already been the buzz and the hype that has been created. But not everybody here in the Philippines would usually care about US box office hype, or film analysis coming from American write-ups. [hit the jump to read the rest of the article]

The Conjuring was set for Philippine release August 21. But Warner Brothers Philippines had an advance screening for The Conjuring in some Metro Manila theaters last August 12 and 13. It seemed like a gamble of faith because if audiences would not have loved the movie, it would have caused a spread of negative ‘word-of-mouth’. But then audiences loved the movie; and everybody who watched it shared their experiences through social media. The positive word-of-mouth for The Conjuring had begun; now the rest of the movie-loving public wanted to see the movie.

A big number of Filipino audiences are usually not really entirely conscious of reviews and anything the foreign media has to say about foreign movies. What most audiences trust as basis for their own judgment, whether to watch a movie or not, is word-of-mouth. To the average Filipino movie-watcher, nothing compares to a personal endorsement of a friend or somebody unrelated with the media. In this case, Warner Brothers seems to have harnessed its potential via the Advance Screening. Word of Mouth usually makes its way around in the span of a week or two. Usually, a movie would have its theatrical run in only one week’s time. By the time the word of mouth has spread, that movie had already been replaced by a new movie. Those who had been stung by the word of mouth would have already missed the movie’s run. The Advance Screening manages to let the buzz spread beforehand, and in advance, thereby letting the buzz have its own epidemic first, priming a great number of curious movie-watchers before opening the floodgates.  Warner Brothers has its Conjuring cards well played.

In what seems completely unrelated to the actions of the corporate distributor, the spread of bootleg, torrent, and pirated copies of The Conjuring also managed to add to the hype of the movie. Now you have both the people who watched the movie via the advance screening AND those who watched the movie through piracy actively spreading the positive buzz about the movie through social media. Keep in mind that although piracy is rampant, there still is a great number of people who would rather prefer to watch their movies with the crystal clarity of the original. One would usually have to wait for around 3 or 4 months before a crystal clear “DVD Copy” of a movie would find itself floating around the torrents and on the bootleg markets (it is dependent on when the original DVD of a movie would be available in the home video market, the original becomes the source copy for ‘pirated copies’).

Add all the hype generated off foreign media (box office reports, articles, and reviews from the US and UK), the positive buzz generated by word-of-mouth from the audiences of the advance screening in Metro Manila, and the buzz off those who had watched it from pirated copies... add it all up with an opening day which is a holiday. No office, no classes. The result is a strong attendance at the theaters last Wednesday... at least for Iloilo theaters anyway.

Now, Warner Brothers Philippines’ only problem is the ravaging weather that has been casting really dark clouds over Luzon. They better pray for things to go back to normal, so that their audiences would find some time to think about horror of this movie, and not worry about the real horror of the weather. But whether or not the end result of The Conjuring is successful or not, this is a fine example of a really smart way of marketing a movie.

[by Reymundo Salao]