I’ll bet the Lerwick one shows mostly mainstream stuff though. It would be a fun thing to do. If I ever (did!) or won the lottery it’d be great to either do that or run a Japanese style music cafe somewhere that needed something a bit different.
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I would love a project like that. The stumbling block being the lottery win, of course
I pay the licence fees for our film club. £100 is the minimum cost for a single-screening licence for almost everything that’s more than a few months old (main exception is films which come out via eOne, the grasping bastards). For some licensors that’s a flat fee. But for the main one (Filmbank) it’s a minimum price which converts to 35% of ticket take once that goes above £285.
It is. But it’s hard to make ends meet. Sadly around here people under 45 are either working too hard to get out on a weekday evening or their every waking minute revolves around the flashing lights on their phone. Having to sit for 2 hours with the thing out of sight and earshot is a very big ask. This means the audience tends to be old nodders like me. Some of them are content to watch films about the modern world and/or films which don’t have entirely happy endings and/or films with subtitles and/or films which require you to concentrate a bit. But a surprising number aren’t.
VB
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Ah, I wasn’t sure if you still did it.
I’ll have to ask my brother what their required break even attendance was. I think like yours it tends to be a slightly older audience but they do seem to find films that work for them.
The trick is to charge more for membership and less for the tickets, since when the licence fee converts to a percentage that’s only charged on ticket sales. Then if you can find a cheap but adequately equipped venue you can make a go of it.
Actually it seems to work better in smaller communities where getting out to almost anything in the evening involves getting into a car and driving to the nearest town/city. So Harwell Film Club (village pop a couple of thousand) gets 50 into their village hall once a month to see a 6-month old mainstream movie. It’s a ‘village loyalty’ thing. Didcot Film Club (town pop 27,000) struggles to get the same number into a comfy arts centre with a 6 metre screen to see things not shown at Cineworld, whose front door is literally directly opposite said arts centre’s, and where a 15-minute train ride gets you to Oxford or Reading.
VB