Marketing and distribution - this is an interesting piece. It's profit AND loss for the studio - they sell ads (or the theatre sells ads), and buy ads. It's lik

Marketing and distribution - this is an interesting piece. It's profit AND loss for the studio - they sell ads (or the theatre sells ads), and buy ads. It's like all the websites trying to make money on google ads, advertising on ... google ads. You can bet that really stupid decisions are made here, because they can't save money without losing a revenue stream, or pissing off theatres. And Box Office sales are really important, because they are the first figure to be released. If 10 million people watch the movie, it's a good movie, so the DVD shops it (doing free advertising for you), and the TV Channels will pay more (even if everyone thought it was awful). They want to "anchor" the movie as being a money maker, by maximizing Box Office sales. If you shoot a brilliant movie, like The Shawshank Redemption and nobody goes to see it, then the DVD shops won't push it. This means you'll only sell copies by word of mouth, by which stage the price has gone down.