This is Miss Mary, a 93 old woman who works AMC theaters cleaning trash people leave behind. My heart hurt watching this. This is not the way it should be. 🥹💔
Pepsi paid $2 billion for the rights to market the Star Wars prequels. They went all-in on this first film. The toys ended up making more money than the tickets. All of it was built on a poster with no actors, no plot, and not even the movie's full name.
On November 10, 1998, an ad agency called New Wave Creative, working with two Lucasfilm employees, Ellen Lee and Jim Ward, put this image into theaters. It just said "Star Wars Episode I" at the bottom. No subtitle. A kid walking in the desert casting Darth Vader's shadow. Star Wars hadn't released a new film since Return of the Jedi in 1983. This one image had to sell the comeback.
Pepsi's deal covered everything. Pepsi cans, Frito-Lay chips, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC. They printed 8 billion cans featuring Star Wars characters. Guinness World Records listed it as the largest brand partnership deal in history. Lucasfilm's own ad budget was just $20 million.
When the teaser trailer dropped a few days later, it only played in a handful of U.S. theaters. Fans bought full-price tickets to a 3-hour Brad Pitt movie called Meet Joe Black, watched the 2-minute Star Wars trailer, and walked out before the film started. Some theaters started replaying the trailer after Meet Joe Black ended so people would actually stay in their seats. That trailer got 35 million downloads online, which in 1998 meant waiting an hour on a screeching dial-up modem to watch a pixelated rectangle on your monitor.
The Phantom Menace opened May 19, 1999. A workplace consulting firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, estimated that 2.2 million Americans skipped work that day, costing employers about $293 million in lost productivity. In one day. The movie made over $1 billion at the box office. The merchandise made roughly $2 billion, nearly double the ticket sales. Lego's Star Wars toy line blew past its own sales forecast.
I looked up what happened to the people behind this poster. Ellen Lee went to Pixar. Jim Ward became president of LucasArts (Lucasfilm's video game company), ran for Congress in Arizona, and then became CEO of the Phoenix Symphony. New Wave Creative went on to design the posters for Borat and Shaun of the Dead. And Drew Struzan, who painted the theatrical Star Wars posters (the colorful painted ones you probably picture when you think "Star Wars poster," not this minimalist teaser), died last October at 78 from Alzheimer's.
The Star Wars franchise has generated an estimated $46.7 billion in total revenue. Pepsi bet $2 billion on a franchise that announced its comeback with nothing but a boy and a shadow on a wall.
Avatar: Fire and Ash has been in theaters for 85 days, and it proves why the 90‑day window still matters. Disney kept the movie in cinemas and let it build real momentum. When you give a film room to breathe, people keep showing up. This is how the theatrical system is supposed to work, and Disney actually respected it.
While I’m not a fan of Avatar 3, but they did the right thing and let it collect as much box office as it possibly could. The movie paid for itself and more. That means digital full purchases, rentals, and Physical Media will make them even more money when it releases on Home Video.
While it’s great that Universal is moving to 45‑day theatrical windows in 2027, Disney is already doing this, and doing it better.
If you want to save cinemas and theaters around the world, they have to be exclusive.
All movies should have 90‑day windows. All movies should make their money back in theaters. That should be the goal. Some movies will fail, but many will be given the opportunity to succeed. I want movies and theaters to succeed even if some of these movies I personally don’t like. A healthy industry allows more movies to be made, with voices for everyone. We can have movies for women, movies for men, and movies for minorities and underrepresented groups.
I personally want to see the return of movies made for men. I want to see action movies made for boys and men, but more importantly, I want to see a flourishing cinema culture where going out on a Friday night actually feels like something again.
Cinemas being only for “events” isn’t sustainable. When Oppenheimer and Barbie came out, it was a special moment for theaters. Even I went to see Barbie, I regretted it, but it was still fun to be part of the event. The problem is you only get a couple of those each year.
So yes, I want to Make Cinema Great Again. And the only way to do that is to make movies exclusive for longer. That gives cinemas more money and allows them to build more theaters and update the ones they have. Imagine cinemas with multiple premium screens. AMC has some, but many Regal locations don’t. Imagine having Dolby Cinema and IMAX in the same venue. That would let people watch multiple releases each week in IMAX and Dolby, all in premium formats. For me, that massively improves my theater experience. Some people don’t need premium, but for me it’s essential. And that cannot happen with 2‑week theatrical windows.
Those are my general thoughts on theatrical windows.
#Cinema #Theater #TheatricalWindows #MakeCinemaGreatAgain @AMCTheatres@RegalMovies
LMAO Kelly exposing American Idol and FOX. The fact that she hasn’t forgotten that she didn’t get the car as a prize while Clay Aiken got one in Season 2 is sending me. 😂🤣
CANCER HAS BEEN CURED
Ivermectin & Fenbendazole cure cancer.
Pass it on.
BREAKING NEWS: First-in-the-World Ivermectin, Mebendazole and Fenbendazole Protocol in Cancer has been peer-reviewed and published on Sep.19, 2024!
The future of Cancer Treatment starts NOW.
My thanks to lead authors Ilyes Baghli and Pierrick Martinez for their incredible inspired work, FLCCC’s Dr.Paul Marik for his extensive work on repurposed drugs and every co-author who worked hard to bring this paper to life.
I hope that this peer-reviewed paper lays the groundwork for a brand new future for Cancer Treatment.
Many of you know that I have been helping thousands of Cancer patients with high dose Ivermectin, Mebendazole, and Fenbendazole
🚨 THE CIA JUST GOT EXPOSED HIDING A CANCER CURE FOR 60 YEARS!
They KNEW back in 1951!
A declassified CIA document (buried since the Cold War and only forced out recently) proves the agency reviewed Soviet research showing parasitic worms behave EXACTLY like cancer tumors at a biochemical level. Even better: anti-parasitic drugs were DESTROYING tumors in lab tests!
But instead of shouting it from the rooftops and saving millions, they CLASSIFIED IT and let it rot in their vaults while Big Pharma raked in TRILLIONS on poison chemo, radiation, and "treatments" that keep patients sick for life.
Why? Because a cheap, simple cure would CRUSH their trillion-dollar cancer industry cash cow. This was never about health. It was population control, Rockefeller medicine, and keeping the sheeple weak, broke, and dependent. How many of your family members, friends, or loved ones suffered and died while the elites laughed all the way to the bank?
The document is public. The truth is out.
They can't bury this forever.
WAKE UP, SHARE THIS BEFORE THEY SCRUB IT, AND DEMAND ANSWERS!
Who else is done being their lab rats? 🧬💀
The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.
“she hasn’t experienced that kind of grief before, we know that she’s lost her mother when she was a child, but i don’t think she knew her mother well enough to grieve her the way she grieves fiyero when she believes that he’s gone.”