Answerman

How Do Small Indie Theaters End Up Showing Anime?

Kevin asks:

Going based off the Kizumonogatari movies, Mahouka movies, and plenty others, a lot of anime movies which get theater releases tend to be in small private theaters. How did these theaters get these anime movie screenings? Was it companies like Aniplex approaching them, or the theaters requesting the movies?

When an anime distributor in North America wants to book a movie in theaters, it's usually far easier to attempt to book the film in small, independent movie theaters than go to the big chains. This is for a number of reasons.

AMC, Regal and Cinemark are the three largest theater chains in North America. Nearly all of their money is made from giant Hollywood blockbusters, with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars spent on marketing and millions in revenue. Some of them, AMC specifically, do make some effort to book "independent" films -- i.e. films from distributors that are not one of the big movie studios (Funimation, Aniplex and the rest would qualify). However, they tend to go after the "bigger indies" -- the ones that are still being distributed by big names, and have a big marketing budget.

As I've written before, when anime gets booked into theaters, they can either try to get the theaters to play the film normally, or pay to rent out the theater and collect the ticket money themselves. (The latter is known as "four-walling.") Four-walling is very risky, because it can get very expensive, and if nobody shows up, the distributor could end up losing a lot of money. Nearly any theater will four-wall a movie for you.

But it's the little indie theaters -- the ones who only have 1-4 screens, or may only control a few locations, that have a lot more flexibility in how they program their films. They may be more willing to take a chance on anime, or be more likely to discover that one individual location has a fan base that supports it. Smaller theaters can make screenings more of an "event" -- they're more willing to put up decorations, put out postcards, and accommodate give-aways and other promotions than a big multiplex can. After all, if you're managing a giant suburban 30-screen theater, are you going to be giving all this extra time and attention to a 200-seat theater showing Mahouka, or are you going to be supervising the line and seating for the sold-out 800-seat theater showing Wonder Woman?

Of all of the theater chains, Landmark Theaters is the biggest one to make indie films a priority. With 56 theaters in 27 "markets" (metropolitan areas), it's a major exception in that they will closely examine most films made available to them, and give them full consideration. Most independent theaters are just one location; others manage a small handful. But working with them is like working with a small mom 'n' pop retailer versus selling stuff through Walmart. Those theaters tend to have a personal touch in their programming and in how they run their operations that is hard to find in a giant corporate behemoth. And when you're a small fry, it's far easier to deal with another small fry than the corporate behemoths.

Independent theaters often have a hard time getting the big blockbuster film releases, because the giant chains have that market sewn up in most places. Small independent film distributors often have a hard time working with giant, impersonal chains who are more concerned with that weekend's giant tentpole release than a tiny indie.

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Justin Sevakis has worked in the anime business for nearly 20 years. He's the founder of Anime News Network, and owner of the video production company MediaOCD. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.