Cashing in at the movies (page 1 of 3)

It has been quite a year for the movie industry in the Middle East. By all rights, 2003 should have been one of its worst ever.

The Middle East economy reached its lowest point in two decades, the Palestinian crisis escalated, and instability or extremism threatened several countries. To top it all, the threat - and then the reality - of war loomed large over the region for months on end.

One would assume, then, that the regional movie industry should be counting the days until the end of the year. Not quite the case, say local insiders. For Karim Dernaika, managing director of Empire International, a leading distributor, 2003 is turning out to be one of the best years in recent times.

"We opened the year with a big bang," he says. "The James Bond film, Die Another Day, created a new record in the United Arab Emirates. It has become the largest grosser after Titanic, with over 144,000 admissions in the UAE alone."

The Bond film was launched on 21 screens and ran for a full eight weeks in the rather small UAE market. But that was not the only big hit of the year for Dernaika and other industry players. Matrix Reloaded, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Gladiator - the list of big hits in the past 12 months seems endless.

The summer was even better, with a string of successes. Terminator 3 was the most awaited film of the year, and the initial response seems to have justified its top billing. Other big films of the summer were The Hulk, Tomb Raider II, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Bad Boyz II.
Nothing - not the economy, not even the war in Iraq - was enough to keep Middle East residents from going to the movies. Salim Ramia of Gulf Films, one of the largest distributors of Hollywood films in the region, says that the war kept people away from theaters for only two weeks. "

For the first two weeks of March, we had rather low attendance," says Ramia. "But since then, business has bounced back and now it is even booming. Matrix Reloaded had the biggest opening in the history of UAE cinema. It recorded 79,000 admissions in the first week alone."

One of the main reasons behind the string of box office smashes is the rapidly closing gap between the time a film is released in the United States and the time it arrives in the Middle East. Until recently, films were released in the Middle East at least four or five months after they had hit screens in the United States; at times, the gap was over a year.

This prompted many movie fans to watch the films on DVD or during their travels overseas. Now, films are hitting Middle East screens faster than ever before. Almost all of this year's blockbusters were released in the Middle East on either the same day or at least in the same week as they were released in the United States. X-Men II came out in the Middle East three days before it hit US screens.

The early release of films has definitely got more Arab moviegoers into the theaters. But that in itself has not been enough to fill all the seats in the hugely oversupplied markets of the Middle East, especially the UAE, which has seen a boom in construction of plush new multiplexes in the last five years.

Cinema exhibitors need much more in order to recover their investments.
They are looking hard at innovative techniques to attract moviegoers. One way out is through aggressive marketing and promotional activities.