An advanced screening of the "brand-d-d new" Spider-Man movie

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a movie my younger son has been anticipating for months. Six months, he said, though it's probably longer than that. At age 12, he's not yet all that polished on estimating times.

You see, Spider-Man is officially his favorite superhero. He also loves the Flash, and last year's Halloween costume was the Flash's archenemy, Reverse Flash. But now that he's made it through the Flash TV series and is not interested in the 2023 film starring Ezra Miller, having been indoctrinated by the negative memes on the internet (I actually quite like that movie), Tom Holland's Spider-Man has claimed the largest percentage of his heart. 

In fact, he likes Holland and Zendaya so much that we considered whether maybe he would like The Odyssey, and since my wife and my older son missed their chance to see The Odyssey last night, that may still be on tap.

They chose Wednesday as Odyssey day, before ultimately missing out because there were only tickets remaining in the front row, because my younger son and I were attending an advanced screening of Brand New Day at the Hoyts Melbourne Central. I'd be working in the city, so he'd need to take the train in to meet me. And he was all set to do that by himself until he learned that the train ride was 30+ minutes and he thought he would get bored. So my wife accompanied him, which she'd always wanted to do anyway, before returning back home.

I jumped on these tickets as soon as I saw my email for the advanced screening through ReelGood. I know events like this tend to sell out quickly, and it so happened that I checked my email just at the right time to get them, knowing it would make my son delirious.

I've talked in the past about an advanced screening doesn't mean much to a kid, at least you wouldn't think. Playground bragging rights are likely not what they used to be, and seeing a movie for free is irrelevant for a kid because their parents pay for their tickets anyway. And really, this was only 24 hours before everyone else could see it -- less than that if they went straight after school. 

But with a Spider-Man movie, the appeal was more clear than for something like GOAT, which was the last advanced screening he and I attended at Melbourne Central. He was giddy for the Brand New Day advanced screening, and we made sure to get there plenty early to take in all of the festivities. 

In fact, it was almost not early enough. We got to Melbourne Central around 5:25 and weren't supposed to start queueing up until 5:45 for a 6:30 start, so I took my time eating two slices of pizza in the food court downstairs. He didn't opt for anything to eat, knowing there would be free popcorn and wanting to save his appetite for that. 

But when we did go up around 5:50, there was a huge line to get in. This is not something he usually experiences, so he likened it to the David Byrne concert we went to earlier this year, his only such previous memory. The line to check our QR codes was not so long that there was any danger of missing the start of the movie, but I did have enough time to panic slightly about the quality of the seats we would get. It turned out those fears were unwarranted, as they'd allocated two adjacent auditoriums, the fanciest two they had (more on that later), and there were plenty of optimal seats when we got in wearing our special Spider-Man wristbands and plopped down our jackets to claim our seats. (Remember, it's winter here.)

The lobby had most of the usual jazz you would expect. A number of Spider-Man displays where you could take photos, including a classic red carpet, though it does not appear there were any actually Hollywood dignitaries in attendance. Plus some classic comic book covers framed lovingly. In fact, the whole Melbourne Central was decked out in Spider-Man fanfare. Here are some pics:

There were other good pictures I took that capture the scene, but unfortunately, all of them have either my son or me in them, and you know I try to avoid posting photos that violate my family's privacy. 

The Takis? There was one on each seat. I was more charmed by this at the start of the movie than when I saw product placements for Takis about four times during the movie. 

We posed for photos on the red carpet and in front of another display, our wrists set in the classic Spider-Man web-slinging pose. It was good fun. 

In any case, we were excited enough by the lobby stuff that I forgot a crucial movie ingredient for my son: the lollies. When he worried about the size of the free popcorn, I told him we could probably get a second one on our return from the bathroom, which worked out just fine. He already had one drink, which was enough in that regard. 

But he didn't mention a bag of lollies, which we would always get in a situation like this because we wouldn't normally be getting free stuff, and sometime the free stuff would include something sweet, either lollies or an ice cream. It was only during the middle of the movie that I realized we'd forgotten about this, and it actually caused me about five minutes of anxiety as I worried my son would be having a somehow less perfect experience as a result. I even offered to run go get him some, but he told me in no uncertain terms that I should not do that. 

In any case, I really liked the movie, and here is a link to my review, just posted.

Oh, I have to explain the subject of this post. 

You may recall from this post that the radio ads for our streaming service Stan include a try-hard broadcasting school grad who insists on pronouncing the D in the phrase "brand new." Most normal people say it the way Jason Hervey says it in Back to the Future -- if you know you know -- which is "bran new." It flows off the tongue more easily and everyone understands what you are saying, even though you have excised one of the letters.

But no, the true broadcasting school style would be to include the D, so the announcer says, as I've written it and as my family jokes about it, "brand-d-d new." Just try saying it with a D. You'll hear it and you'll notice how ridiculous it sounds.

Well, apparently the woman who introduced the movie to us had also had this broadcasting school education, because she also announced it as "Spider-Man: Brand-d-d New Day." My son and I looked at each other and laughed.

And here are some other related thoughts (no spoilers):

Apex in Apex

No, in this case, the Charlize Theron vehicle on Netflix from earlier this year is not actually involved, though I did think it would be funny if you saw the movie Apex in the Apex screen format.

I mentioned earlier that this was one of Hoyts' fanciest two screens, both of them relatively new, carved out of an existing space. (If you knew the layout of Melbourne Central, you'd know there is no space for new building.) The other screen is one I talked about in my post about seeing The Odyssey on opening day, the "LieMAX" theater that passes itself off as a true IMAX screen. 

This one? It's called Apex, though it was not immediately clear to me what that meant. 

Well, here's an explanation for you from the internet:

HOYTS APEX is a premium cinema format featuring super-sized curved LED screens, high brightness, and Dolby Atmos sound. It replaces traditional projectors with direct-view LED technology for a sharper and more immersive picture. [1, 2, 3]

And here's a picture that shows what it looks like:

As you might guess from me having written a post about "LieMAX," I'm somewhat skeptical of this theater's tendency to be honest with me about the experience it's providing, and specifically, its justification for charging more for that experience. (Under ordinary circumstances. Obviously I wasn't being charged anything here.) But I have to say, I did find the curvature of the screen to be cool in the way I found the original curved TVs appealing, and the picture did look quite good.

Ret-conning May Parker's death date

This is as close to a spoiler as we'll get here -- well, maybe one other -- but it's a spoiler for Spider-Man: No Way Home, not for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. And, well, I guess it's too late to warn you now that I've included the spoiler in the sub-heading.

Anyway, you've seen No Way Home so you know that Marisa Tomei's Aunt May buys it in that movie. R.I.P. Marisa. You are still as beautiful as you were in My Cousin Vinny.

That movie came out in 2021, so by the general logic that these movies take place in our present tense, that would have been the year Aunt May died. Yet there are several pointed shots of Aunt May's gravestone in this movie that list the year of her death as 2024. 

This is confusing to say the least. 

My first thought was that they were trying to establish a sense of the recency of the event. They want it to have occurred more recently in the story than five years ago, so they are ret-conning it so it was only two years ago, if we take the present day to be 2026.

But I just looked it up, and the present tense of the MCU is supposed to be 2027 -- a little confusing as that is only one year (or really, five months) away. Wouldn't it be easier just to make it align exactly with the release date of the movie?

But let's say it is 2027. That makes her death three years ago. Fine. 

But in the movie, we're supposed to believe that at least four years have passed since she died. Because in this movie, we see (very mild spoiler, don't worry about it) the entire college careers of MJ and Ned pass at MIT. Last time I checked, an undergraduate college career is four years. Meaning that either the death should have been 2023, or the present tense should be 2028. 

It's confusing enough that the easiest solution would have been just to deemphasize the death year. You can shoot a gravestone in such a way that you can see the name but the years of the lifespan are out of the shot. Instead, the camera focuses on it so much that you'd almost think it was an intentional instance of getting us to think about the years. 

One thing I will say is that the birth year is listed as 1964, so that means May was 60, or about to turn 60, when she died. Tomei is only just now 61, so in 2021, when May's death was actually shot (it was really probably 2020), Tomei would have been only 56, because her birthday is in December. The rare case of aging an actor up rather than down. 

A traveling troupe of 2026 collaborators

I thought about making this last one its own post, but might as well just squeeze it in here and totally abuse today's word count, not to mention your patience as you read. It'll save me from having to do two consecutive Spider-Man: Brand New Day posts, in any case. 

The other spoiler that I think is not actually a spoiler is that the Punisher is in this movie. Everyone already knows that, right? At least I think they do. He's played by Jon Bernthal, and interestingly, I don't think he is ever once called the Punisher. In fact, he's only ever called Frank. His last name, Castle, never even makes it in.

Bernthal has something in common with Holland and Zendaya, which is that all three of them appear in The Odyssey.

That got me thinking about the weird coincidence of how many actors appear in the same movies as each other in 2026. If it is just a coincidence. Who knows, there are so many of them that maybe they formally aligned their schedules so they could all be available for the same projects.

We wouldn't necessarily be surprised if that were the case for Holland and Zendaya. They are married, after all. But how about these others?

1) Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are in three of the same movies in 2026: The Drama, The Odyssey and Dune: Part 3. I don't think I'd be worried just yet if I were Holland, but it might raise an eyebrow.

2) Florence Pugh and Zendaya are together in two movies, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Dune: Part 3. Oops, is it a spoiler that Pugh is in Brand New Day? Maybe I should stop telling you I'm avoiding spoilers while continuing to include spoilers. 

3) Anne Hathaway is in everything. But I'm not really sure that fits the exercise.

I thought I had more. I guess it's good I didn't make a separate post of it.

Okay you can go now. 

Selling Brendan Fraser without showing Brendan Fraser

The marketing for The Whale has been a challenge, which is probably not unexpected.

When you're advertising, you usually want to cater to your reader's/viewer's most basic needs and desires. It's why they choose video stills from the trailer that are the most likely to show something vaguely erotic, even in a movie that is not sexy in the slightest. I wrote about that tendency here. 

I don't think there's probably a single image in The Whale that has the chance to get a heterosexual male all hot and bothered, even when taken totally out of context. But if you can't show anything sexy, at least try to show something that isn't sexy's exact opposite. At least that's the computation the marketing department for a studio -- or in this case, a movie theater chain -- would make.

I get why advertisers don't want to show a picture of Brendan Fraser's Charlie in this film. Charlie weighs about 600 pounds, and there's no angle that doesn't reveal that fact about him. Never mind that Darren Aronofsky's whole movie is designed to make us sympathize with Charlie, challenging our regrettable instincts toward fatphobia to show us the depths of this person's soul, rather than just the surface of this person's body. If the marketing department thinks a picture of Charlie's face -- which, you would agree, is the image you'd extract from the film if you wanted to truly demonstrate what it's about -- will inhibit ticket sales, they won't include it.

Which is why this still, in an advertisement for the movie playing at Hoyts, includes an image of ... Ty Simpkins.

Was Ty Simpkins considered the sexiest thing in The Whale? If you were going sheerly by normal advertising logic, you'd probably go with Sadie Sink, who is young and is generally considered to be conventionally attractive. She's also arguably the film's second most important character, though Charlie has dynamics with a couple characters that are central to the story depending on the angle from which you're analyzing it.

So on the one hand, I guess it's a win that they didn't just go with the most obvious approach of weaponizing the apparent sex appeal of Sadie Sink. On the other, Ty Simpkins? Least essential character in the film, I would argue, though of course all five characters we spend time with make the film exactly the emotional powerhouse it is.

The really troubling inconsistency here is that the ad's copy is specifically selling Brendan Fraser. It starts out with the words "The Brenaissance is upon us!" Which I think is a pretty lively way to market the movie. It rolls off the tongue better than "McConaissance," or however they spelled it when Matthew McConaughey stopped doing romantic comedies. 

But it creates quite a disconnect with the image we see. Yes Fraser undergoes quite the transformation in The Whale, but not even the best actor in the world can play 33 years younger without some sort of significant digital assistance. (Could they really be trying to convince readers this is Fraser? Certainly not.)

And I just don't think The Whale is really a bait-and-switch movie. The title itself is not going to attract anyone outside of marine biologists and Moby Dick enthusiasts, and certainly most people with any inkling to see it must know the premise of the movie. Or at least the sort of person at its center.

And it's not Ty Simpkins.

Would you Uber Eats a movie popcorn?

Oh Hoyts, bless their little hearts.

That sounds incredibly condescending, but I swear I don't mean it that way.

What I mean is, it's sweet and quaint and so doggedly optimistic that they are trying to make up some of their massive financial losses during the pandemic by getting us to order movie theater popcorn to our houses.

I really hope some people are doing it.

Now, I'm not saying there's no market at all for this sort of thing. There could be. We all know that there is some kind of magic crack they sprinkle on popcorn made at the movies that makes it taste better than anything you can make at your house. In fact, when some company tries to convince us that they've cracked the code and brought the best-tasting popcorn possible to the supermarket shelves, they advertise it as popcorn that tastes like movie theater popcorn.

But we shouldn't forget that one of the key charms of movie theater popcorn is its warmth. While Uber Eats may be able to keep your pizza or your Chinese food or your Big Mac warm on the trip from the place of its origin to your house, I don't know that the same is really possible with popcorn. By starting at a lower temperature to begin with, you're inevitably going to lose almost all of its warmth, if not all of it, by the time you deliver it to the person who ordered it.

Maybe warmth is not even the goal. While this whole enterprise is designed not only for Hoyts to turn a buck while it can't make money on movies, but also to give some of their employees a paying job, I can't imagine that they have somebody sitting there making popcorn all the time on the off chance somebody orders it. Even in times of desperation, and maybe especially then, businesses have to be run with a common sense approach.

What touches me about this email is that I know how much Hoyts is struggling, behind its desperate effort to insert a breezy attitude. Here's a sample:

"Has this cold weather got you craving your candy bar favorites from Hoyts? We got you!"

There's enthusiasm in that text, but I know there's also pain behind it.

I've been too worried to even check in on any of the theater chains around here, to see the signs plastered to their windows about their temporary closure. I've been too scared to google any news about them to see if any have already said they're going under. Even as things start to open up around here a bit -- my younger son goes back to school on Tuesday -- I understand theaters will be one of the last things to follow suit, probably not until July. And even then, who knows how they will do until they can get a steady diet of new releases coming from the U.S.

And even then, who knows if this virus will be the final nail in the coffin for an industry that was already losing viewers to streaming and the many platforms that provide it.

Hoyts is not even a chain I frequent anymore, this email notwithstanding. A couple years ago they stopped accepting our critics cards, which is something they'd clearly been wanting to do long before then, as they had only accepted the card on weekday afternoons and Monday and Wednesday nights even before dropping their participation altogether.

But I do have this rewards membership from a time I had to buy tickets for my kids to see a movie there, combining it with a day at the shopping center that also included a trip to Pancake Parlour. And I do wish them well, as a purveyor of the thing I love most.

We all know AMC is in trouble in the U.S., as rumors of a bankruptcy filing float around. I have to imagine it could only be worse with smaller chains, though I suppose the economies of scale may favor them instead. Probably a lot has to do with how effectively they were running their business before all this.

Alas, I don't think I could save Hoyts even if I did Uber Eats a movie popcorn from them.

Let's just hope the return of movies, and the return of audiences, can do it instead.

That's one way to boost ticket sales

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has no cause for complaint about its box office. It may be in the final weeks of being a truly muscular performer, or those final weeks may have already come and gone. As of right now, though, its nearly six-week run has produced a certainly healthy enough $1,032,361,535 worldwide, though I'm writing this at least a day* before I will publish it. (*It ended up being four days. I'm not rechecking the numbers.) By publishing time, maybe it will have already overcome the indignity of being a couple million dollars behind Despicable Me 3. Its current earnings have it at only 39th of all time, but with a couple more weeks of decent business it should easily crack the top 30 with an outside shot at the top 20.

And the Hoyts theater chain in Australia is certainly doing its part to get the movie there.

I'm a Hoyts member -- a membership I almost never use, since I try to see movies for free and Hoyts no longer participates in my critics card program. (The handful of us who were taking advantage of that were bankrupting them, it seems.) I think those 235 points you see above are a pretty paltry total.

As a member, though, I of course receive their emails, and Friday I got one entitled "Are you the ultimate Star Wars fan?" Curious, I clicked into it, and saw the following:

"See Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker more than anyone else to win!

The HOYTS Rewards member who sees the movie the greatest number of times will score an out-of-this-galaxy prize, a Samsung Galaxy 10+ Star Wars Special Edition prize pack valued at $1,999*.

There are also three runner-up fan packs up for grabs, filled with $200+ worth of official Star Wars merch."

The devil is in the details, so of course I followed that asterisk. It did not, it turned out, contextualize the stated $1,999 value of the prize pack, though I don't suppose you'd likely be able to audit the items to determine their true value. Plus, the true value of something like a signed poster is really in the eye of whoever is setting that value, based on what the market will bear. But as this particular prize pack is not going to market, it's all just speculation.

The point is not whether it's $2,000 worth of prizes (and in a situation like this, wouldn't it behoove you to round up?). The point is that this is a really funny way to get people to buy more tickets to The Rise of Skywalker, as I doubt there is any way to determine how close you are to the goal posts.

Because I know how these things work, I seriously doubt it would be possible to buy just one more ticket than your next closest competitor. It benefits Hoyts exactly zero to make a live purchase-meter available to people who are trying to win this pack. Instead, they implicitly want people to just keep blindly buying tickets to the movie (and presumably, actually going to see the movie) until such point that they think they must have outpurchased everyone else. Without, of course, really knowing when they will have attained that goal.

I suppose there would be some people who might try. And if everyone were as cynical as I am about the wisdom of doing so, you might win with only five or six total viewings.

But if you wanted to be sure to win, it would be a similar calculation to trying to buy enough lottery tickets to increase your own odds of winning the lottery. Which, as we all know, is an impossible task. Hypothetically, you reach a certain point where you have invested enough that if you do win a small amount of money, it is not significantly greater than the amount you invested, and if you don't, which is far more likely, then it leaves you destitute.

Now hopefully, buying $2,000 worth of tickets to The Rise of Skywalker -- which would be about 95 tickets, if you're using a $21 ticket price -- would not bankrupt anyone who was enterprising enough to try it. And you'd hope those same people would know it would be easier just to try to find the items and buy them. But how much of a discount on those items would make it worth buying the tickets? Would you buy 50 tickets in the hopes of securing that prize pack at half price? What if someone else had the same idea but bought 51?

In my previous calculations, I assumed that a live purchase-meter would not be in Hoyts' best interest, but maybe it would be. Maybe it would be a bit like an auction on ebay, where you knew if you still had to bid more to win the item. It would risk getting too few bidders and giving away the prize back for too little investment, but it could also create a bidding war between the two highest contenders, and ultimately earn Hoyts more money. The problem with that is it would create a situation where all the other competitors realized they had no realistic shot and stopped buying tickets. Having everyone blind bid is probably the better way to get more tickets sold overall.

Because I know how these things work, we'll never find out. This blind auction could produce a winner who bought only three or four more tickets, given that everyone who wants to see the movie more than once has probably already seen it more than once. But it could also take in excess of 20 or 30 more tickets, and if it does, it'll leave some seriously disappointed fan who bought just a few fewer than that, and finds himself out $600 with way too much of this film's mediocre screenplay memorized.

MIFF: Mid-week at Hoyts

Hoyts is a massive theater chain, not the type of venue you associate with MIFF. But for the entire time I’ve been going to MIFF, Hoyts has been involved, unlike its largest competitor, Village Cinemas. I’m a bit down on Hoyts for an additional reason than being a massive theater chain, which is that they recently stopped accepting our critics card. Even in the best of times they only allowed us to see free movies two nights a week and during the day on weekdays. But they withdrew altogether last year. Screw them.

MIFF, however, apparently remains a profitable endeavor for them. So the Hoyts at Melbourne Central is where I spent three straight screenings on Wednesday and Thursday nights, which I will tell you about now.

The first was the Sundance Audience Award winner from this year, Brittany Runs a Marathon. It’s also the second MIFF film I’ve reviewed, if you want to check that out here. It stars Jillian Bell, who I think of as appearing in a lot of Seth Rogen films, though it’s actually only one (The Night Before, which is where she came on my radar). She plays an overweight 28-year-old whose life is going down the tubes, but she tries to turn that around by first jogging, then training to run a marathon.

It’s been an unusual MIFF in terms of high-profile releases, as the Cannes Palme d’Or winner, which usually is one of the most sought-after tickets at MIFF, already opened here theatrically. That was Parasite, and it was great, and I surely would have seen it at MIFF had it been playing. Desperate for something else with awards buzz, I slotted Brittany in straight away as a must-see. The type of movie that wins at Cannes is pretty different from the type of movie that wins at Sundance, though, and this was a pretty typical Sundance winner. Which is to say, I liked it quite a bit but forced myself to be honest about its limitations, which means I knocked a potential 8 out of 10 down to a 7 out of 10 in the above review. Who knows, maybe it’s an 8. It’s good. I liked it.

I had enough time between the two ends of my double feature to go downstairs and get a pastry called a coffee pan from an Asian bakery chain I like called Pafu. That was supposed to be where I met a friend of mine, the same who attended In Fabric with me on Saturday (and will be seeing a double feature with me next Thursday). However, somehow he ended up at somewhere called Pafu on the second floor of Melbourne Central, though I’m still not sure the explanation for that and thought it best not to dig too deeply. Anyway, I bought him a coffee pan and met him in time to go into Berberian Sound Studio.

This is only the third film I’ve ever seen at MIFF that I had already seen before, and only the second that wasn’t a special screening. In 2017 I saw both of my previous instances, a performance of Fantastic Planet with a live score (which was great) and my first time seeing Strange Days on the big screen. I might’nt have prioritized Berberian, which I have already seen twice before, except that my friend is interested in giallo and this is also a film I’ve never seen before on the big screen. Besides, I’m currently mulling what will be my favorite films of the decade, and a film I’d already seen twice is certainly a candidate.

Unfortunately, on this third viewing I found myself a bit impatient with the film’s pacing, which had never been a problem for me on previous viewings. Part of that was that there were certain parts I was looking forward to, but couldn’t really remember how soon they might be coming. Part of it was also that by recommending it to my friend, I felt the urgency for the film to deliver its good bits with a certain regularity, to justify my praise of it. Fortunately, this is not an impatient viewer, and he said he really liked the film – a big improvement on our mutual impression of Peter Strickland’s new film, the aforementioned In Fabric.

This was also my second time at MIFF seeing Strickland himself. He came out beforehand at In Fabric and also did so here, as MIFF is doing a retrospective on his films this year (which is why the seven-year-old Berberian is playing). This time he stayed for a Q&A afterward, and so did I. I actually asked him a question, which was how they created that perfect scream that the character Silvia (Fatma Mohamed) delivers near the end of the film, as the image of her diminishes in the frame to just a speck. (Which was one of the moments I was impatiently awaiting.) Alas, here was a mild bit of disappointment as well – as Strickland himself said it would be before he gave his answer. It wasn’t some clever bit of sound design, it was just an extracted moment from the song “Glory Hole” by Nurse With Wound. I’ve just listened to that on YouTube and confirmed it. Oh well.

Thursday night summoned me back to Hoyts for the premiere of my wife’s film A Family, which as I said yesterday, I will not discuss in any detail in terms of its quality. Nothing at all should be read into that in terms of whether I liked it or not. Just take that at face value: I said I wouldn’t discuss whether I liked the film or not, and I still won’t.

I will say that it was fun to be involved in a world premiere, as there was a similar place where you could take pictures in front of a MIFF background as there had been at opening night of the festival, only this time it was just for her film in particular. It was also lovely to see all sorts of familiar faces from our life here in Melbourne turn out for my wife’s big night. I sat in a seat that had a “reserved” sign on it for I think the first time ever. And then stayed for the Q&A afterward, which also featured my wife and a lot of questions from people who had obviously enjoyed the movie.

Which felt really, really nice.

Saving Hoyts Kiosk, four rentals at a time

They’re building a new Woolworth’s supermarket down the street from us, which my wife and I both consider a very exciting development. In fact, part of the reason we’re dragging our feet on moving, something we think it might be prudent for us to do, is because we don’t want to move out of our neighborhood before it gets its Woolies. It’s supposed to open in mid-2018, which is soon soon soon.

We’re both excited about the easy access to our preferred grocery store, but for a while I’ve been secretly excited about something else I thought might accompany this new store: a Hoyts kiosk.

You see, when I first came to Australia, most of the Hoyts kiosks resided in Woolworth’s. Back then, I could still get new release rentals from a couple video stores, but those video stores closed a good three years ago. Now, these telephone booth-sized repositories are about the only remaining way to rent physical media.

Soon, there will be none. Instead of hoping that my new Woolies might get a Hoyts kiosk, now I’m reconciling myself to the fact that there may not even be a Hoyts kiosk business model by mid-2018.

The signs of impending doom have been there for a while. First they closed the newest one they’d opened, at an IGA that was conveniently on my ride home from work, near my son’s school. Then they closed the one at the IGA that’s near my work, which I used to ride out to at lunch.

But the real harbinger of the apocalypse came when they closed all the kiosks in the central business district. I mean, all of them. I used to frequent ones at the Queen Victoria Center or the Melbourne Central Shopping Center, the latter of which actually had two in its heyday. But when I went a few weekends back to let the kids pick up a movie, as a way to get them to cooperate with the several errands we had to run (and so I could pick up something for myself without them hassling me), the one in the QV Center was gone. Poof. A few days later, I was at Melbourne Central and noted that one had vanished too. When I searched online for the closest to the postal code for my work, I found them only in suburbs whose names were only vaguely familiar to me. I mean, they were all within a reasonable distance, in terms of kilometers, but none of them represented realistic options for me.

Except one. There’s still one at the Woolworth’s in Moonee Ponds, which is a ten-minute drive from my house.

So that’s where I went on Saturday, renting a whopping four titles for the weekend viewing binge just completed: The Book of Henry, 47 Meters Down, The Beguiled and Wind River. I’d have rented more if there were more I’d wanted. (I opted to pass on Flatliners, though it does make a good if unfortunate thematic accompaniment to this post.)

Rent ‘em Saturday morning in time to get them back by Sunday night. Perfect.

Yeah, that was $16 worth of rentals, but on iTunes it would have cost me more than $20. A disturbing number of the movies I want to rent from iTunes are $4.99 and even $5.99, and though I’d have to rent some that way, I didn’t want it to be all.

My first instinct was to figure out if the most number of movies I’ve ever rented at one time from a kiosk would entitle me to some kind of bulk discount. It had been a long time since I’d gotten one of those emails from Hoyts, telling me I could rent one and get one free – or more likely, rent three and get the fourth free. Something that usually wouldn’t be practical for me, but would be in this case. I even went to the website to look for deals. The last one they offered was a three for $9 deal in September. I could practically see the tumbleweeds rolling through the promotions sections on the site.

Then of course it occurred to me that the point was not to see what I could get from Hoyts for the minimum financial output. The point was to try to keep Hoyts in business. So in the end, I gave them my $15.96 with a smile.

The smile faltered pretty quickly though. These kiosks are already a relic, and soon they’re going to vanish entirely. In terms of my sentimental love of the video store, they’re a poor facsimile to begin with, but even this poor facsimile soon will be gone. And my $15.96 is not going to postpone this inevitability by even a minute.

It heartened me some to see that when I first got there, there was a couple puzzling over what they were going to rent, then another woman coming up and rubbernecking to see when it would be her turn. This small traffic jam at the kiosk, which ordinarily would have annoyed me and instantly made me impatient, instead felt like a positive sign. I did about $30 worth of shopping and returned to find it open for me to use.

But I’m kidding myself. The Hoyts kiosk is in its death throes. Few people are willing to put up with going to great lengths to rent a movie one day and return it to a specific location – albeit one of any number of (increasingly fewer) specific locations – by 9 p.m. the next day. For not much more on iTunes, you get your movie instantly, and if you don’t start watching it that day, no big deal. You have 30 days to start watching it. And once you start watching it, you have 48 hours to finish. Even stretching it, the most hours you can get out of a Hoyts rental is about 36.

The upcoming loss is symbolic more than practical. Practically speaking, iTunes always wins, in everything except the money – and even then, you have to factor in the extra time and petrol (gas) it took me to make round trips to this Woolies on consecutive days. Since I keep relatively little free space on my hard drive, downloading rentals from iTunes has always had a cap on it in terms of my capacity, but recently even this is no longer a problem. I only recently started noticing, perhaps because it only recently became available, that you don’t actually have to download your rentals anymore unless it’s convenient for you to do so. You can just stream them. Which I did this weekend with The Trip to Spain and Columbus, easily and without any drama.

So Hoyts will lose, in the long run, but maybe it will go longer than I think. Maybe the reason Hoyts is no longer operating in areas of high transit, like those locations in our central business district, is because it isn’t really practical for people to get to those locations both to pick up and return movies. Though maybe it would be practical just to serve a small neighborhood, where people can rent and return by foot. It’s keeping the Moonee Ponds kiosk in business – for now. Could my neighborhood be that kind of neighborhood?

I said up at the top that I’m trying to save the Hoyts kiosk by giving them my money at this crucial juncture in their existence. But I’m fooling myself. I could only rent those four movies because my family was out of town and I was watching during the daytime. And once my 2017 list closes, in just eight days, I’ll go into a period of not caring much about new releases on video. In fact, I typically don’t start renting again from the Hoyts kiosk until the first 2018 movies start coming out on DVD, usually sometime in May.

If there is still a Hoyts kiosk to rent from in May. 

I whinged, they listened

If I'm going to slam a business, however mildly and humorously, it's only right that I recognize the ways they've made good.

And it's always nice to be reminded that when I write things on this blog, I'm not just shouting into a void.

So as you may recall, in this post, I discussed how the Hoyts kiosk had failed to hold my reservation for the movie Nerve. I wrote the post not to give Hoyts a hard time, because it was really only a mild annoyance to me that could have been caused by any number of technical or other factors, one of which it actually was caused by (which I'll get to in a minute). The experience was even less of an annoyance to me in retrospect, given that the movie I rented in its place (The Purge: Election Year) ended up being a huge hit with me. In fact, I wrote the post only to tell a boring story about a meaningless transaction -- a story I probably only considered newsworthy because I thought of the irresistible title "The Nerve of them." (God, are my standards for posting to this blog really this low?) That title was probably my most critical thought directed at Hoyts in the whole piece.

Well, Hoyts took that post very seriously.

You can imagine my surprise when I received an email from them last Friday entitled "Hoyts Kiosk Experience." It went on to mention that they had heard about my recent experience (they didn't say which) and would like to discuss it with me.

I hadn't, of course, actually reported the problem to Hoyts. It could only mean that they had read my blog. But I didn't quite think that was possible. It just seemed too unlikely.

I forgot to contact them over the weekend (I think I had to wait until business hours anyway) so a second email came on Monday. Intrigued (and seeing that the call would close in three business days if I did not respond), I took some time to step away from my desk and call them.

Indeed, they had read my blog. I laughed out loud.

It's not that I'm such small potatoes, but, well ... I'm such small potatoes. Or at least, I tend to forget that my blog does actually get seen by people, especially people who are seeking out references to themselves. It wouldn't be the first time. I half suspect that Kevin Smith has read everything I've ever written about him, though the only evidence I have is that Smith is known for that type of thing. (Fortunately, most of it has been good.)

So yeah, they came across my blog, and I later discovered that it wasn't even that far down in the search results when you google "Hoyts kiosk Nerve." They doubtless were not googling those particular key words, so they came across it in some other way.

The nice woman I spoke to advised that the issue had to do with using the same credit card you've reserved the movie with when you go to pick it up. I did, and that should be obvious, but I didn't consider the fact that I've recently gotten a new version of this card. Maybe the Hoyts system should be smart enough to figure out this is what happened, but I can't really blame it. I mean, that kiosk was trying to save my movie for me, and considered this other guy trying to rent it to be an interloper.

The end result of the conversation was that they sent me codes for two free movie rentals. Good on them. Or maybe I should say "Good on you," since they/you will probably be reading this.

What I find funniest about this is that this is the second time a movie kiosk company has interacted with me through my blog. Years ago I wrote a post about an illogical interface on Redbox, and one of my readers brought the post to the attention of the company. A Redbox representative actually commented on my post that they appreciated my feedback and were going to change the problematic user interface.

Now if only movie studios would start contacting me and giving me my money back for movies I didn't like ...

Anyway, kudos to Hoyts for being proactive. I hope everything you read about yourself on the internet is nice from here on out.

The Nerve of them

Might as well go for a second straight day of rental-dispensing mechanisms not working properly.

I was planning to go out drinking with three work friends on Friday night, only one of whom still works with me. I'm 43, so nowadays that's more likely to mean getting home around 10, rather than after midnight as it might once have meant. After 10 with anywhere from a few to a half-dozen drinks in me ... that might leave me in shape to watch a movie when I get home, but it couldn't be anything too demanding. And as the year is drawing to its close, I probably need to be filling these available time slots with movies whether I'm in shape for them or not.

Nerve has recently arrived on video here, and that seemed to fit the bill perfectly. Under 100 minutes, probably best viewed late at night, and kinetic enough that I won't fall asleep.

So I planned it out on Friday morning. I was going to go out on my bike at lunch to run a couple errands, once of which would be stopping by the IGA in East Melbourne to pick up the movie. In order to give myself the greatest chance of my errands being completed successfully, I went on the Hoyts Kiosk website and reserved Nerve. A few minutes later I got the email confirming that they had checked the inventory of the machine in question and confirmed that the title would be waiting for me for the next six hours.

Well, it wasn't. However many copies they had of that movie, they were checked out when I got there.

This might not have been quite as annoying except that the first errand I had attempted, buying new sunglasses at a nearby 7-11, was also a failure, due to their total lack of sunglasses.

Refusing to come home empty-handed, I did my best to find a suitable substitute and ended up with The Purge: Election Year. I hated the original Purge and did not even see the second one, so I was never planning to see this for a number of reasons. You might say there's an additional reason not to watch it in that our real election year has gone so badly. But it did fit the bill for the type of content I could handle at that hour and in that state, and the minutes in my allotted lunch hour were rapidly ticking away, so I snatched it up and went on my way.

Back in the office and checking out my emailed receipt, I've discovered another annoying surprise: They've increased the rental price. Whereas rentals have previously been $3.50, now they are up to $3.99. Still a savings from an iTunes new release, I suppose, but creeping further and further away from the dollar and change I used to enjoy spending at Redbox kiosks in the U.S. Then again, with the rate set at $3.50 for the entire time I've been in Australia, they were due for a price hike.

Trying to figure out why they told me I had a movie reserved and then didn't have it for me is probably not worth the effort, though it does inspire me to quote Jerry Seinfeld: "You know how to take the reservation. You just don't know how to hold the reservation. And that's really the most important part of the reservation: the holding."

What very likely happened was that someone was standing in front of that kiosk, renting the final Nerve, at the exact moment the system was trying to confirm that a copy was available. Due to a lag in updating cached information, I imagine, the system was not aware of the movie's sudden lack of availability, nor could a prior claim by me deny an ongoing transaction in which someone already had the movie in their shopping cart but had not officially rented it yet. Anyway, doesn't matter.

I do have a joke explanation. The last time I used the Hoyts Kiosk website was to reserve a copy of Bad Moms last Saturday night. We were over at a friend's house for dinner, and stayed a lot later than we expected to. Having a car full of kids who were a good 90 minutes past their bedtimes, we skipped renting Bad Moms, so the reservation went unclaimed. Which also meant that it could not be rented to anyone else during those six hours I had it reserved -- a possible loss in revenue of $3.99. I figure this is Hoyts' way of giving me a dose of my own medicine.

By the time I post this, I will already know whether I liked The Purge: Election Year or not. But since I'm writing this a day ahead of time, I'll save any thoughts I may have on it for a subsequent post.

Corporate chickenshittery

If you're a business, one of your primary financial responsibilities is to understand the risks behind the decisions you make. For example, if you put one of your products on sale, you have to weigh the benefit of the increased volume of business against the possibility that so many people will respond to the offer that you will actually lose money by offering the product too cheaply.

In the case of most sales, however, it's a good risk. Even if you do lose a little money in the short term because you're selling products at too close to your cost to obtain them -- or really, just making less money on them than you should be, and thereby creating a domino effect on your other costs -- the long-term gain usually outweighs it. By getting people to become customers for the first time, you are gambling on the likelihood that they will buy from you in the future, even when there's not a sale on.

Simple, right?

Apparently, even this is too much risk for Hoyts.

I just noticed in my latest email from Hoyts -- which operates dozens of theaters throughout Australia, as well as the kiosk rental business being advertised in this email -- that a certain "2 new releases for $5" deal is a bit too good, in their estimation, to present it to customers without preconditions.

See if you can see what I'm talking about here:

That's right, that bottom line of legalese includes, after the date, the words "unless withdrawn earlier."

Um, what?

They can't even commit to the fact that this sale won't bankrupt them for the next 18 days until the offer expires?

I call bullshit on that. It's a "have your cake and eat it too" philosophy of running a business. And though it may be pragmatic in many ways, it's also something that people like me should call them on.

What they're essentially saying is that if people respond to this deal too much, Hoyts reserves the right to simply rescind it. If it's such a good deal that people get in riots in order to rent up every last copy of Free Birds, and it starts to effect their bottom line, then poof! The offer's over.

Ridiculous.

This is why you have risk departments and analyze deals like this exhaustively before you present them to the public. You try to figure out what your exposure is. You forecast the worst-case scenario if you massively underestimate the interest level. And then you make provisions for that worst-case scenario in the parameters of the deal -- such as shortening its length so that you'll minimize the damage if you miscalculated.

Eighteen days not short enough for them?

And then they actually have additional paramters in place, which is that the deal is limited to "eligible titles." In other words, it's a way to move older shit that's not renting that well anymore. Anything new likely doesn't even qualify for this deal.

What I find most absurd is that this is not even a deal involving a finite amount of consumable items. Movies being rented from kiosks are an inexhaustible resource, to a point. Sure, after x number of uses they may cease to function properly, or get scratched and become unreliable. But only the latter is a realistic concern when we're talking about a six-month lifespan inside a kiosk. The likelihood of scratches increases the more you expose your product to numbskulls who don't care for it, but let's be honest -- most of us do our best to handle DVDs properly.

And it's not even that good of a deal. Two movies for $5 is only a total discount of $2 from what it would normally cost. And because you have to get two, the reality is that it's actually a $1.50 profit per customer, since most people only plan to rent a single movie at a time, if all else is equal. You're getting them to spend more without costing yourself any more, except for the barely perceptible financial loss associated from a customer not being able to find the title they wanted and just deciding not to do the deal altogether.

While I'd like it to be my support that's "withdrawn" from Hoyts, the truth is that their kiosk is one of my best and cheapest (even at $3.50 a pop) avenues for getting new releases, and I'll be doing that quite a bit for the rest of the year. The two for $5 deal would even intrigue me if I ever had the chance to watch two movies in one day, a near impossibility between work and children. The deal I'd really like is two movies for two nights for $5.

Of course, that would certainly end in Chapter 11 for Hoyts -- or whatever the Australian equivalent of Chapter 11 might be.

Kiosk crisis

The best thing about movie rental kiosks is that they're automated.

However, the worst thing about movie rental kiosks is that they're automated.

I took this picture last Friday afternoon in the Carlton Woolworth's, just for giggles, because I don't think I'd ever seen a movie rental kiosk (Redbox, Hoyts or otherwise) open with its guts hanging out. It was interesting to get an idea of just how many movies one of these things actually contains. A total which was, I guess, not all that surprising.

Little did I know it would eventually need to become the artwork for the harrowing tale I am about to tell you. (Forgive the exaggeration in advance.)

A few minutes after taking this photo and finishing my shopping, I stopped by this kiosk to pick up Kick-Ass 2, which I had planned as my final evening's viewing before my wife and newborn son came home from the hospital. You see, I had assumed that the technician in the picture was only restocking the kiosk with new releases, and removing a corresponding dozen or so that were no longer earning their keep.

Instead, this is the message I saw:

That pretty much scuttled my plans to watch Kick-Ass 2 before my wife and second son came home -- which did feel like a mild disappointment at the time. 

A bigger disappointment came the next day, when they had to stay in the hospital an additional night because her blood pressure was reading high. But it did mean my viewing of Kick-Ass 2 was back on the table. I just had to go to a different Hoyts kiosk, and as luck would have it, an errand I planned to run anyway would bring me within easy range of one.

"Easy" ended up being a relative term. I had to circle around the neighborhood on my bike a couple times before I located it, mostly because it's only in the neighborhood in question (called Docklands) in a technical sense. But I did locate it, and came away with my copy of Kick-Ass 2.

Watching Kick-Ass 2 brought on another disappointment. It's just not very good.

As disappointment piled upon disappointment, it ended up being yet another extra night in the hospital for the patient(s). This would be the fifth recovery night, sixth total if you count the night she gave birth. Thus far, I had been fulfilling her nightly entertainment needs by taking our iPad home on my first visit of each day, downloading a new movie to watch that night (there's no public wifi at the hospital), and returning the iPad for her to watch that night. Now that the stay was going from long to truly ridiculous, she told me just to bring her computer instead, and rent a DVD.

I had to return Kick-Ass 2 to the Docklands kiosk anyway -- I could have returned it to Carlton if I didn't suspect that kiosk was still in a state of disability -- so I texted her with choices I thought would be good for her state of mind (nothing too heavy). She was sleeping, so I made some choices for her: Epic, which I had the ulterior motive of getting to watch with my older son the next day, and This is the End, which it turned out she had already seen. For myself I finally rented Mud.

Back at the Carlton Woolworth's while picking up my older son from his grandfather's, I noticed that the out of commission message was still up on that kiosk. That was 48 hours without being fixed. Granted, they were 48 weekend hours, but they were also 48 hours at the end of New Year's week, when plenty of people are still on holiday, still wanting to watch movies. I shook my head and starting mentally composing a blog post titled "Profitability shmofitability," which would gently tease Australians about the sanctity of their weekends.

The real drama started on Monday, when my wife and son finally got to come home from the hospital. My older son and I had about the most unsatisfying viewing of Epic you could imagine. I should have taken it as an omen when we first tried to watch it but the movie itself was still in my wife's computer, which was in her bedroom, where she was napping. After she awoke we attempted the viewing, but he was too distractable, not nearly interested enough in the characters (too many humans, not enough snails) to sit still for more than about 15 minutes. I of course had to plod on and finish the movie while trying to wrangle him and prevent him from jumping all over a woman recovering from a Caesarian section. I am incredibly stubborn about finishing what I start, especially at this time of year, with my ranking deadline just around the corner.

So we got a later start for the kiosk than I hoped, heading out a little after 4. (We = me and my older son, who was riding in the child carrier attached to the back.) I took a different route up a bigger hill, and when I tried to shift down into first, my chain came off and got mangled in the gears. At first assessment I was sure it was a total loss, but I kept on tugging and pulling on it, my fingers growing as black as night, for ten minutes. I finally wrenched it out, and it would power the bike -- sort of. The chain would slip and sometimes stick, and it never went around a whole time without making the telltale sounds of a partial shift. But it was going to be a better option than walking my bike to the kiosk, some two miles away. And definitely a better option than paying $10.50 in late fees.

Without being able to shift down into first, I really huffed and puffed up this hill until I could finally take a left and start going slightly downward.

Upon arriving outside the building containing the kiosk (a Coles supermarket), I was entirely unsurprised to find that my son had fallen asleep in the back. This always happens if he hasn't had a nap and has any kind of wheeled conveyance lulling him to sleep. I considered letting him sleep, and just sitting against the wall near where I locked up the bike and reading while he dozed. But the day had already been an exhausting one, so I roused him from his slumber, eliciting many whining complaints, and took him inside to the kiosk.

Where I saw the following message:

Oy.

Actually, this message was still a few minutes off. At the actual time I walked in, the kiosk was rebooting. A guy in front of me was returning The Great Gatsby. "I went to insert it and it just rebooted," he explained.

We sat through two reboots, in sullen silence, until finally the message above did show up.

He wandered off, probably back to his car, which could easily convey him to another Hoyts kiosk. Me, I had to look up the next closest one on my phone and rely on a broken bike to get me there.

Which was too much to handle with my grease-covered hands and a little boy who had to go potty.

After locating a bathroom in the neighboring outlet complex, I drank what was known as a pine lime smoothie, while my son turned his nose up at the cookie I'd bought him, saying he wanted a different one. My stare was a thousand yards and then some.

Eventually, I summoned the energy to return to the Coles, buy something my wife needed, and continue on my way -- not before checking the status of the kiosk both before and after buying the item.

I huffed and puffed my way to a mall called Melbourne Central, another couple miles off, where I searched four floors before finding the kiosk. It would be too easy for the Hoyts kiosk to be right near the Hoyts theater, right? Way too easy. Instead it was in the basement outside of a Coles that I didn't even know was there.

Suffice it to say, I did not add to my complications by renting any additional movies.

It was nearly 6:45 when my son and I finally returned home.

Having written this whole thing out, I think it's probably only interesting to me, and I'm sorry you had to read it. Then again, if creating a sense of exhaustion and frustration to mirror my own was the goal, perhaps I have succeeded.

A good day to rent Die Hard

Everything is more expensive in Australia than in the U.S.

Except when it isn't.

First it was miraculous $6 Mondays at Cinema Nova in Carlton. It's such a cheap rate that I've missed seeing a movie there only two Mondays since I moved here (both times due to conflicts with baseball playoff games I simply had to watch).

Now, Hoyt's kiosks -- which I first discussed here -- are undercutting even the low low price of Redbox in the United States.

Having rented from the green box near the exit of the Woolworth's in Carlton twice now, I received an email from Hoyt's a couple days ago talking about a new price structure, one I couldn't quite believe. It discussed that new releases will still be $3.50/night, but that slightly older releases -- dubbed "recent releases" -- would now be available for just $1.

I figured their definition of "slightly older releases" would be the five to ten oldest titles in the box, which may have been kicking around in there for a year. It would be a pretty easy advertising trick that would accomplish the goal of getting people to stop at the kiosk in the first place.

But when my first choice of a movie for Sunday night was out, I checked on A Good Day to Die Hard, which would have only hit video maybe six months ago. Indeed, I was pleased to see I could pick it up for only $1 -- which will be helpful as I round out my list of 2013 viewings in the interest of finalizing my rankings in early January.

Mind you, that's 30 cents cheaper even than Redbox right now. Granted, it doesn't apply to the whole stock in the box, but it still qualifies as unbelievably inexpensive, by Australian standards.

Good thing, too, as the fifth Die Hard was barely worth a buck.

Things are feeling a bit more American all the time here. Cheaper movies? Check. Halloween? Check. It was almost not celebrated at all when my wife was young, but my son trick-or-treated for the first time in his young life this past Thursday. Baseball? Check. Australia must be baseball mad, considering that Sunday represented my second failed attempt to rent 42 from that Hoyt's kiosk. I wonder if the Aussies are already preparing to host the first two games of the regular season next March in Sydney, between the Dodgers and the Diamondbacks. My wife and I will be in attendance for at least one of those games.

I suppose A Good Day to Die Hard was an appropriate movie to watch if I'm pondering an American cultural invasion. John McClane and his son end up shooting up a large quarter of Russia, God bless 'em.

Maybe they were trying to make the movies cheaper in all the Moscow movie kiosks.

Greenbox

So one of the disadvantages of living in Australia is that you have to wait longer for certain movies to come out. I'm not sure when the following movies actually opened here, but they're still playing at the local arthouse theater: Mud, Before Midnight, Beyond the Hills, Upstream Colour (they add the U here) and The Great Gatsby. All of these came out in May or earlier in the U.S.

One of the advantages, however, is that other films come out earlier. Take the Four Weddings and a Funeral ripoff -- frankly, the ripoff of any number of romantic comedies -- called I Give it a Year. I notice it only had its limited theatrical release in the U.S. about a month ago.

Here? I was able to rent it a Greenbox kiosk earlier this week.

Of course, they don't call the Hoyts kiosks "Greenbox" -- not that I know of, anyway, though I haven't discussed it with any Aussies -- but in all other respects these kiosks seem to be following the Redbox model.

A few slight differences:

1) It costs $3.50 to rent a movie for one night, rather than the $1.20 (before taxes) it was costing at Redbox before I left. That price is consistent with the SAM (Standard Australian Markup).

2) You can buy previously viewed copies of movies. Don't think Redbox wastes any of its limited real estate per kiosk on that. Costs are prohibitively high, though, something like $12.99.

3) The extra real estate devoted to previously viewed copies for purchase means there are no random back titles. I don't know how often people rent the Redbox random back titles, but they must do decent business or else Redbox wouldn't bother stocking them.

Even with the increased cost per rental, it's still a savings of something like $1.50 from the standard rental price of a new release at a video store (such as Video Ezy in nearby Flemington, of which I have recently become a member). So I'd be all over these Hoyts kiosks, except ...

... there isn't really one near me. The one from which I rented I Give it a Year is a 35-minute walk, and I'm only making that walk because my son is still in his last days at his old preschool before he moves to the new one around the corner from us. My last day walking him there is Monday. Only last Monday night even made sense as a day to sample the Hoyts kiosk, because I knew I was going to be walking my son back to the area the next day. He's been going to that preschool on Mondays, Tuesdays or Fridays.

However, I wouldn't count me out of the Hoyts game. Was it Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park who said "Life finds a way"? You can paraphrase that quote and apply it to me:

"Movies find a way."