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Gennaro Castaldo watch: Can I take you to the cinema?
This is grim news: HMV's plans to open cinemas are being talked up - but not by the company's cougar of quote Gennaro Castaldo. Oh, no:
Simon Fox, HMV's chief executive, said that the cinema has the potential to be rolled out to "wherever we have larger stores", including above branches of Waterstone's, the book retailer that HMV also owns.
This, clearly, is an act of folly too grand for Gennaro. It calls for a brass hat from head office to come down and explain that, for some reason, turning the office space upstairs into a cinema is the most natural thing in the world.
The heart of the idea is in the right place:
As well as showing new releases the cinemas, which will open at 9am, will screen films on behalf of local schools, have screening for parents with young children, and could beam live music events from HMV's concert venues. [HMV's partner in the scheme] Curzon's existing cinemas show already show live opera from the Met Opera in New York.
Offering a community resource is a lovely idea, and does fill a gap that many towns will feel - although how far the bottom line will be boosted by showing Peter And The Wolf to class 4B is debatable.
Is there really a business in showing films in small spaces? Who does HMV think will want to go to the cinema at nine in the morning? People who have lost their jobs but are too ashamed to tell their families?
4 comments:
Perhaps it's a cunning trick to get people to choose dvds over cinema. One often hears of tales from around the cinema world of audience numbers being effect by the low prices of dvds and here they can show that in their shops. "Look, why go upstairs to the cinema when you could get it down here for lower!" could become a catchphrase in the aisles of Kettering's HMV. Or if that fails they could always build an arcade... I've heard those video games are just swell!
Gennaro Castaldo... on demand!So I decided to do a little research on the subject of Gennaro Castaldo and I discovered that there is a LinkedIn page purportedly belonging to him. The contact settings on the page say that he is interested in expertise and reference requests. If he accepts requests from bloggers then the entire community may never have to write a music article without Castaldo quote EVER AGAIN!!!!
Erm because films are released on DVD four to five months after the release in a cinema. This would be a great boon to me and my family if they opened a cinema in my local HMV
Didn't the film industry ran that useful series of adverts a few months back pointing out that you can buy most films on DVD down the pub as soon as they're in the cinema?
Seriously, though: you have a "local HMV" but don't have a local cinema?
And you really expect HMV to be showing latest blockbusters? I wouldn't expect that - when Setlios tried to break in to the cinema market, he discovered that distributors aren't keen on upsetting their larger clients by sharing new stuff.
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