The Big Picture

Twenty-five influential films have been selected for the 2023 Library of Congress National Film Registry, the Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today. The films are selected each year for their cultural, historic, or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage. The newest selections include a diverse group of films, filmmakers and Hollywood landmarks exploring the drama of history, social justice and reform, the experiences of immigrants and more. This year’s selections date back more than 100 years to a 1921 Kodak educational film titled A Movie Trip Through Filmland about how film stock is produced and the impact of movies globally. The most recent films added to the registry are 2013’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave and the Oscar-winning documentary 20 Feet from Stardom.

This has been a momentous year for digital cinema pioneer Arts Alliance Media. The company celebrated its twentieth year in business and the tenth anniversary of one of its flagship products, the Screenwriter theatre management system that has supported cinema operations through the transition to digital cinema. First launched in 2013, Screenwriter was designed to supersede AAM’s first generation theatre management system that supported exhibitors enrolled in the virtual print fee program as they upgraded to digital cinema equipment. Consequently, Screenwriter embodied an operational restructure, enabling cinemas to centralize their workflows from a single screen instead of traditional, manual methods. The company also launched Screenlighter, a theatre management system designed to solely meet the operational requirements of independent and one-four screen cinemas. But today, the company is thinking only of the future and the ways in which it can help the cinema industry thrive in the months and years ahead. To get a better sense of the company’s plans, I recently spoke via email with David Ong, AAM’s chief commercial officer. One thing he made very clear was the fact that at AAM, people matter most.

Last week AMC Theatres announced that Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film had officially become a record-breaking movie. The film, which was announced with tickets on sale Thursday morning, shattered the record for single-day advance ticket sales revenue at AMC at $26 million. The previous record of $16.9 million was held by Spider-Man: No Way Home.

PVR-Inox, India’s largest cinema chain, has been implementing impactful marketing tools to promote new films, in this case, a horror film. In a recent initiative, the chain used fear to show what it is like to see a horror film alone, on a big screen, in this case – Insidious: The Red Door.