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Looking at the numbers he probably wont need to go looking to recruit people who havent heard of him, Scrubs is one of the most popular comedy series of recent

Looking at the numbers he probably wont need to go looking to recruit people who havent heard of him, Scrubs is one of the most popular comedy series of recent times and Garden State was a pretty big hit. Garden State was a good quirky indie romantic comedy, it wasnt particularly formulaic in execution but if you can dislike entire genres for being the same there are probably plenty of things to find in it to not like.

VLM 14y ago
"Garden State was a pretty big hit." Yeah that's exactly what I mean by narrowcasting. Wikipedia claims $26.7 million north American box office, if you estimate $10 per ticket that big hit equals 2.67 million north americans watched it. Google's quick guess of population of north america in 2008 five years ago was 528 million. That means movies are so incredibly narrowcasted that if 99.5% of the population can't be bothered to watch, its a big hit. If you try to appeal to only a tiny 5% fraction of the general population, you get 10 times as many paying viewers than if you get a pretty big hit solely within the tiny moviegoing crowd. Thats the power of broadcasting or mass media vs narrowcasting. Many people have commented that its a cool movie, I'll add "Garden State" to my list.
- packetslave 14y ago
  Well, in the sense that it cost $3.5mil to make and made $26.7mil just in NA, it was a "pretty big hit". This is the same reason Kevin Smith gets to keep making movies: he doesn't spend a lot and makes the studio a bunch of profit on DVD and foreign sales, even if his NA box office tanks.
  - jholman 14y ago
    That's not what "big hit" means. The name for that is "highly profitable".
- jtheory 14y ago
  Not that it completely undercuts your point, but you have to limit your numbers to the population that sees R-rated movies in the theater. There's a chunk of your "population that can't be bothered to watch" that were too young, or who were in nursing homes, prisons, hospitals, etc. and can't reasonably watch any movie in the theater.

VLM 14y ago

"Garden State was a pretty big hit." Yeah that's exactly what I mean by narrowcasting. Wikipedia claims $26.7 million north American box office, if you estimate $10 per ticket that big hit equals 2.67 million north americans watched it. Google's quick guess of population of north america in 2008 five years ago was 528 million. That means movies are so incredibly narrowcasted that if 99.5% of the population can't be bothered to watch, its a big hit. If you try to appeal to only a tiny 5% fraction of the general population, you get 10 times as many paying viewers than if you get a pretty big hit solely within the tiny moviegoing crowd. Thats the power of broadcasting or mass media vs narrowcasting. Many people have commented that its a cool movie, I'll add "Garden State" to my list.

packetslave 14y ago
Well, in the sense that it cost $3.5mil to make and made $26.7mil just in NA, it was a "pretty big hit". This is the same reason Kevin Smith gets to keep making movies: he doesn't spend a lot and makes the studio a bunch of profit on DVD and foreign sales, even if his NA box office tanks.
- jholman 14y ago
  That's not what "big hit" means. The name for that is "highly profitable".
jtheory 14y ago
Not that it completely undercuts your point, but you have to limit your numbers to the population that sees R-rated movies in the theater. There's a chunk of your "population that can't be bothered to watch" that were too young, or who were in nursing homes, prisons, hospitals, etc. and can't reasonably watch any movie in the theater.