Movie Theatre Economics

New York Times has a really nice graphic representation of box office sales. (NYT)

Now, it'd be nice to answer a question about demos and previews - the Q being - does it help? Ultimately, do we want to go see things that we know or we don't know. Does that preference change as we grow up? A study (ArsTechnica) found that for games, releasing demos might not help sales after all. And since you do spend a lot of time releasing demo, etc, it would have some economic implications as well.

What demos and previews re meant to do, I believe, is to lure customers into buying the end product. It's like ice cream shop offering a free sample.
However, how much do you tell? One thing that I noticed is that if the movie is targeted towards adults, the trailer is a lot less conspicuous. There are lots of cuts, there isn't much flow, and basically you can't follow it to extract out a story. In some of the trailers targeted towards kids, however, things are easy to follow. The trailer itself tells a story.

Now is this because they haven't figured out a way to create hype without giving the product away? Or perhaps because they haven't yet figured out how to keep kids interested? (Pretty much impossible for them not to know - this was figured out by the time Sesame Street rolled around). IMO, creating lots of excitement and hype without giving your product away (like Batman's trailer, for example) would be the best way to make a trailer. This would also help kids convince parents to watch the movie. We like certain uncertainties.

Anyways, just a ramble.

Yeah, I watched Batman yesterday night.