Second Round of Serenity Screenings Sold Out

j1ggl3x writes "From a Rotten Tomatoes news article: 'Following the sell-out success of the May 5th pre-screenings, creator Joss Whedon recently announced that more advance previews of his movie Serenity would appear at twenty theaters in twenty cities, this time on May 26th. By the next morning, well before the official list of cities was posted, fans on the Serenity movie site and elsewhere had diligently located half the listings through trial and error and several of the locations were already sold out. Serenity hits theaters on September 30th.'"

Comments

Fox Drops the Ball Yet Again

[Luigi30]

So has Fox dropped another franchise on its way to success? Are they going to pick the ball back up like they did with Family Guy?

Re:Who cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

News for nerds.

You're clearly not one.

To the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

"By the next morning, well before the official list of cities was posted, fans on the Serenity movie site and elsewhere had diligently located half the listings through trial and error and several of the locations were already sold out."

Ladies and Gentlemen. Now THOSE are fans.

Quick Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys need to get the idea out of your head that a highly devoted fanbase is the same as a large fanbase. Just because some rather limited amounts of seats sell out instantly doesn't mean the movie can't flop.

Re:Man, Fox really dodged a bullet

[furiousgeorge]

>>so if 5 million sets were sold, that's only $75 million.

did anybody here pass economics? Ok... how about at least TOOK economics?

There's a big difference between revenue and profit.

Going from the math above, fox POSSIBLY brought in $75 million for the DVD's (that's not counting promotional costs, etc etc).

Did the shows cost nothing to produce? 14 episodes of a SciFi show.... i would bet $5million an episode is a reasonable estimate. Thats $70 million in costs right there. Plus marketing, blah blah blah.

Yes the DVD has been a hit. In numbers. But you can't say it made fox a fortune. It more than likely is just covering the costs that the show LOST during its run.

Re:I'm going to be asked to turn in my geek badge.

[kyojin the clown]

haha this is so true, i did it with both BSG and firefly, neither of which i had seen before i borrowed the DVDs off a mate. you watch the pilot, and then you watch the next one, just to see what happens, and then before you know it its 4am and you have watched half a series.

you know you are broken when you get up early to watch more the following morning. of course, doing it this way means you are devasted when you reach the end and there's no more.

Re:This early?!?!

[tankd0g]

To drive Firefly DVD sales of course. And it's working.

Re:Man, Fox really dodged a bullet

[BreadMan]

>> did anybody here pass economics? Ok... how about at least TOOK economics?

In the patched-elbow world of economics, profits mean excess after cost + acceptable return for the investment. Given that line of thought, profits in an competitive market gravitate towards 0, meaning participants earn the acceptable return on investment, but no more.

So, revenue > cost may not generate enough to cover the expected return for the risk involved; I don't know what type of return the industry expects from this sort of activity, so I can't say if Fox earned a profit (in the economic sense) or not.

That said, show-business accounting is nortoriously shady, even productions with revenues far above cost show a loss on the company's books.