1. How many screens do you have?

2. Do you have to order trailers yourself (or your company does it), or do you receive automatic shipments from the film companies?

3. How many trailers for a typical film do you receive? (Total of flat & scope)

4. How many trailers do you receive that never get used?

5. Do you send trailers back? If not, what do you do with them (give to another theatre, storage, disposal, etc?)

6. If a small theatre in your vicinity wanted to acquire your excess/used trailers, would you (or could you) cooperate?

Answers to these questions will be greatly appreciated, along with any other comments you might have about how to solve this problem. Thanks in advance.

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My business partner (Ian...who is a frequent poster to this forum) and I operate a 5 screen arthouse in Northern California. I find the whole trailer thing very frustrating as most of the companies we deal with won't release trailers to us until we have a firm date. Once we have a firm date trailers have either been all gobbled up by the major markets. There are some exceptions - Consolidated Poster Service which handles all of Sony Pictures Classics stuff is great and I always make sure to return their trailers promptly. Miramax is frequently frustrating as they seem to send stuff out to their regular clients and then there is nothing left at National Screen.

Sometimes I want 5 trailers of something and we frequently show 6 or 7 films in our 5 plex - the most I've ever gotten is 3 - usually 2 flat one scope.

We return most trailers, however, we have also "adopted" a small market theatre whose operator is a friend of ours and he gets all the unsolicited stuff we get sent and the trailers we are done with that don't need to be returned or we ask him to return them to the trailer service when they are finished with them.

If I order trailers, I make sure I use them. Since I pay for shipping of trailers I order, I don't order stuff I don't need.

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>>2. Do you have to order trailers yourself (or your company does it), or do you receive automatic shipments from the film companies?

They usually come automaticly. Sometimes
we'll order more if we didn't get enough, but that rarely does any good.

>>3. How many trailers for a typical film do you receive? (Total of flat & scope)

Depends on the company. Fox- 6 to 7 of each. Disney the same. Paramount 3 or 4 each. Ne Line 2 or 3, 4 if its a big movie, each. The rest seem to be sent out at random.

>>4. How many trailers do you receive that never get used?

If the competeing theatre in town has that movie booked, which means we won't show it, we don't use them at all.

>>5. Do you send trailers back? If not, what do you do with them (give to another theatre, storage, disposal, etc?)

If I'm sent a pre-paid label I always send them back. If not, they go into 'storage' for a while and eventually end up getting thrown away.

>>6. If a small theatre in your vicinity wanted to acquire your excess/used trailers, would you (or could you) cooperate?

They arrive automatically. We use what we are able to.

The rest are heaped in piles.

I used to work for Cinema USA (now defunct) and we had to beg for trailers.

There is no intelligence involved with trailer distribution! I think it must be a government thing! (LOL)

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#2. We've found that our theatres that have ALWAYS been First Run get stuff automatically shipped to us. Our theatres that we've ressurected from Discount have more trouble. We assume there is a list that somebody needs to put us on, but nobody ever seems to do so. We end up having to order specific trailers for our lesser theatres.

ALSO - Having a good repore with Exhibitor Relations Reps. helps a lot. We are in GREAT with New Line - they love us. We ask for it... they send it.

#3. Technicolor only allows HALF of your total screens in trailers. They don't understand that sometimes you play more than one film in each house, but still, it makes sense for your typical first run theatre.

#4. I would say about half. Most of the time it's because all of our movies are Scope - and they sent us mostly FLAT trailers. Other times it's just because we're too darn lazy to change the trailers for something new. (It's not a trailer unless it's ingrained into your memory for an eternity)

#5. NOPE - Trailers end up getting sent to the District Manager - which he then takes home and throws in a box in his film vault in hopes that one day he'll want 50 copies of a Stuart Little preview.

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2. Combination of both - when I receive my weekly trailer requests from corporate, I look in the cabinet and see what I have, then order what I need to fulfill the requests.

3. 2 Flat/2 Scope (or so...depends, there's no set amount)

4. Maybe 2-3/week.

5. Send them to our discount theatre in Omaha, NE.

2. Trailers are automatically shipped to us

3. 8 flat and 8 scope (that's an average sometimes it's more (like the fifteen copies of "15 Minutes" we were sent!)

4. We throw away about half of any given title

5. No, don't return them. We usually throw them away. Only very rarely do we get the pre-paid return shipping bags, and when we do, it's only for one company. Depending on what's comming out, we may throw out about 30-40 trailers every two weeks. No one has the time to sort out just one company's trailers, and then throw the rest away.

6. Generally, we would give them to any one who asked, but they would have to come and get them. We would not pay for shipping, or even pay for a person's time to sort them.

We keep a "core" for several weeks with the trailers we want- we reuse the core, so we don't need that many trailers. We've tried telling this to the distributors hoping they will send less, but the trailers keep comming.