Why are movies shipped to theatres under Aliases

Cafe Society
1

So reading the trivia bits for Transformers on IMDB, I noticed that, apart from being shipped in a locked container, it was sent to the theatres under an alias - “Cobra” according to the site.

I have noticed on occasion a similiar thing being done with other movies. From my limited sample set and occasionally spotty memory, it seems to me to be “much anticipated” sequels and big budget blockbusters that do this “whole shipping to the theatre under an alias” thing.

My question though is what is the point? What dastardly behaviour by the evil* theatre employees is this covert action supposed to prevent? :confused:

  • Note I don’t personally know any theatre employees and have no basis in fact for the supposition that they are evil, and am merely using the term for dramatic effect.

[Presuming given the topic this belongs in Cafe Society - but if general questions is the place Mods feel free to move it]

2

As big an industry as movie pirating is becoming, and you have to ask?

3

When I managed a movie theater, some films were sent via pseudonym, not not many. This, however, wasn’t true with trailers–any highly anticipated trailer was always given a boring, inert title, primarily because it’d be very easy to steal a few hundred feet of film (as opposed to 6-7 reels for a feature).

4

It makes people in distribution feel like they are doing something to fight piracy.

5

Obviously the pirating question crossed my mind, but I don’t see how it would be an effective tactic to prevent it.

I will first say I don’t know how movie theaters are run, but I presume the boss of the theatre would know in advance what movies he will be screening, so if a movie showed up with “Cobra” on it, wouldn’t they go hang on? we’re not showing a movie called Cobra? What the…?

Or they get their weekly shipment of movie reels in and oh look, we have all the movies we were expecting except for Transformers, but we have this extra movie called Cobra. Gee I wonder? Why don’t we just chuck this on a projector to check what it is? (Or heck I presume the frames are big enough to have a quick look at a bit of the film by hand to check what it is)

I just don’t see how the alias thing could be an effective tactic to countering movie piracy. :confused: It seems to me the people, i.e. the theater employees that you are concerned about pirating the movie are going to know about it, one way or another before the official release.

To me, the other thing they mentioned on IMDB about digital locks seems far more effective to me. “Here is the Transformers movie, but you cannot open it until the studio calls you on the day with the lock code.”

6

It’s not the theater employees they’re worried about–it’s the various stages that the print takes on its route from the lab/distributor to the theater. Opening weekend print traffic can be enormous, so it’s sometimes a bit easier than you think for one print to fall through the cracks–especially if the destination is a megaplex, where it’s not uncommon for a theater to get 3 prints for 5 screens of a particular film. What will the thief do with the print? That’s often secondary (some people steal just to steal, or don’t think too far ahead), but those measures are taken if anybody thinks there’s a particular title that will be a magnet for pirates/collectors/novelty hunters/etc.

7

I guess that makes a little more sense, if it’s not the theatre employees the measure is directed at.

I guess I presumed that with the size of the piracy problem, the studio’s would have fairly tight controls over the “chain of ownership” if you will, of the actual prints, and it wouldn’t be as simply as, oops oh well, looks like a print of the latest summer blockbuster has gone missing between our production house and Megaplex A. Damn those tricky pirates.

On a related queston, who owns the actual physical film? I always sort of presumed that theaters purchased “exhibition” rights to movies, and sent the print back to the studio/distributor when it 's screen run was over. Yay or Nay?

8

Yay

9

What does the studio do with all those returned copies?

I want an original un-Lucased Star Wars.

10

Sometimes they rent 'em out to institutions that want that sort of thing. You know, university theaters that host a “movie night” or church groups or whatnot. Back in college, I sat in a projection booth with a friend of mine for several different films (Men In Black, I remember…can’t recall other titles), which were shown free for students. Basically, the films were rented on the cheap after the original theatrical run, when the studios had nothing else to do with them.

Most of the film, I’ll wager, is simply destroyed. After a chunk of film has run through a projector a hundred times, it’s not in the best shape, even assuming it never needed additional splicing or other repairs. There’s really not a practical use for used film, not even as archival copies, since they’d want cleaner film for that. Most collectors aren’t interested in speculating on the future value of current films, and studios don’t have the space to store all that film on the off chance it may become valuable in the future. So, although I don’t know for certain, my money’s on destruction.

Oh, and movie theater projectors don’t really function in a way that you can just “chuck a film in and see what it is.” Unless you’re running something quite modern, most projectors use horizontal reels, about five feet in diameter, which spool out from the center, so you’d need to run the film off its shipping reel onto an empty reel before you could run it through the projector. New movies are shipped on twenty minute reels, six of them for a two hour movie, which are spliced together at the theater into a complete movie. And the projectors don’t have a “rewind” or anything, so once you’ve started a film, you’re committed to running it all the way through, unless you cut and resplice, which is NOT something you want to do casually. When the movie’s run is through, the film is cut back onto the twenty minute reels, repacked into the cans, and shipped back to the distributor.

But yeah, the film is large enough such that viewing individual frames is easy. Of course, it might not be easy to tell what film it is, depending on the frames you can see, and you don’t typically want to unspool hundreds of feet of film looking for a title.