.. free movies? Might be.
God knows film studios and their appointed PR companies try their hardest to get the great unwashed to watch their trailers, hoping that audiences will scream and slap themselves silly wanting to see the film and thereby clawing back all their money and them some.
Well, it would help if studios made interesting films. The only film that truly stirred any emotion before it landed was Prometheus, but Fox PR flooded every bloody social media site, TV and radio with trailers, virals and everything in-between that I got fed up with the sodding film. To date I’ve still not seen it. Way to go killing that “special” moment, Fox (and associated PR folk).
Roland Emmerich is a director I admire. I was stunned by Stargate – absolutely loved it to pieces – and even went as far as emailing Centropolis Entertainment (we’re talking about my days pre-film industry here) to ask them about whether David Arnold would be working on the Stargate SG-1 series. Alas, I didn’t know Emmerich and Devlin weren’t going to be involved with that show at all! But I did get a terribly nice email back from Dean Devlin explaining the situation.
Years later, I’d be working on his 10,000BC film at MPC (and occasionally seeing Emmerich walking in and out of the building coming to check up on the VFX). It caused me to miss the Stardust premiere which I was rather hoping on attending (grumbles about long hours making entertainment and not being able to enjoy said entertainment at the end of it – but I already attended a private screening and was at least grateful for that).
Anyway..
Apparently Roland has a new project (not a film) in the works called Flimmer (Deutsche for “Flicker”) a new PR scheme for rewarding people for viewing the trailers. Emmerich and his company partners are calling this system “earn-per-view”, but nobody has yet expanded on that phrase.
My guess is that you earn points for watching trailers (or possibly even streamed previews) , providing all manner of feedback to filmmakers and studios, in turn gaining credits to spend on renting (or possibly owning) movies that can be streamed or be downloaded for offline viewing. Everybody wins – you get to provide valuable early opinions to the filmmaker/studio, and you get free movies in return. The studios saves time and effort setting up search engine alerts to find out what people are saying about their movies. They’d be getting the good stuff right from the horses mouth as it were.
Flimmer is due to launch in Germany on the 16th August.