Logistics and the seventh art – Trilogy / Part 1
Next Sunday, the 28th, the most famous awards ceremony for cinematographic productions will take place, the Oscar. You're probably familiar with the production and post-production process of a film, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. However, films only exist to be watched and for that to happen, the images must somehow reach the people who want to see them, either on the big screen at the cinema or on their TVs, sitting in the comfort of the sofa in their living rooms. As long as we don't have teleportation like the one on Enterprise, it is logistics that plays this fundamental role.
The studios, responsible for the entire production, must send the finished film to the distributor, which will publicize, market and distribute the film to cinemas around the world. After the end of production, projection copies are made, which can be traditional 35 mm films, very rare today (but which was still used to distribute films such as Interstellar), or digital versions, which are increasingly common in modern cinema.
Traditional film distribution is often a difficult and relatively expensive process. In a large-scale production (with an average duration of two hours), the cost of each copy can reach U$ 2.000 and this value is even higher when subtitles are placed for display in other languages. The reels hold about 20 minutes of projection, which means that feature films can have anywhere from 5 to 10 strips of film. The overall weight of the film and the fragility of the paper also make distribution difficult and expensive.
Figure 1 – The 558 minutes and several reels of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001 -2003) gave carriers a lot of work
Source: New Line Cinema
From the end of the 50th century, the transition to digital projection began. The production of a copy in this format, which consists of an HDD containing the film, is almost XNUMX times cheaper than film copies, making transport and storage also much cheaper, thanks mainly to reductions in volume and Weight. Also, hard disks can be reused for other movies.
This economy was obviously very attractive to the big distributors and carriers in the industry, but many cinemas refused to install digital projection equipment due to its high cost. To distribute the savings generated by the new model, a fee was created that is paid weekly by distributors to cinema chains for exhibition in digital format. It's an interesting analysis of how a well-integrated supply chain works, with new technologies being beneficial to all links.
This does not mean that the process itself has become simple. The transported and stored volume is still quite large, especially for large productions. There is also the question of the confidentiality of the material, as a leak of the content can cause great losses in ticket sales due to piracy. In press presentations and other pre-launch screenings, the film conveyor even stops in a single theater waiting for the projection to end to take the film back, in order to minimize the risk of material theft, a procedure known as “wait and watch” done by logistics operators specialized in the area.
Figure 2 – Nothing illustrates cinema logistics better than a pallet with films
Source: National Film Transport
For this same reason, and due to the aforementioned reuse of HDDs, after showing in cinemas, a reverse operation is performed to return the film to distributors after the exhibition window in cinemas. The figure below shows a simplified schematic of the movie chain distribution operation:
Figure 3 - Scheme of the cinematographic logistics chain
Source: ILOS
Despite these innovations, some issues of marketing caused changes in the film distribution process over the decades and also recently. Filmmakers and major studios are under increasing pressure to get their films to more markets in less time. In the second part of this trilogy, we will discuss some of the challenges that the market presents to film distribution.
References
<http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution.htm>
<https://stephenfollows.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-release-a-film/>
Fernando Chalréo
He has been working on consulting projects in Logistics and Supply Chain for 5 years, with experience in companies in the consumer goods, retail and food and beverage sectors. Types of projects already carried out: Sales & Operations Planning, Inventory Management, Network Planning, Business Process Review, Logistics Indicators and Transport Management
