HN Explorer

Free idea: why there are no trailers for theater plays?

8 points by gtb ↗ HN
I believe there are two reasons people don't go to theater more often: higher ticket prices and lack of information. If you only have a written review by some snoby artsy people and no friend to recommend a play, you might as well go see the latest Transformer - at least you know what you going to get for your money.

If there was a company that produced nice and professional looking (like holywood) trailers of theater plays I believe it could make good business helping producers and theater companies raise their revenue.

6 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 22.9 ms ] thread
Jun8
This is a good example of how parallelism sometimes totally breaks down. Theater and film seem quite similar so your trailer idea sounds logical. To see the problem with it, talk to any person involved with theater, they will absolutely hate it, it goes against everything they are trying to do. See, most movies are created for commercial entertainment, while theater productions are rarely so (at least they don't see this in that light). Think about a trailer for a Chekhov play or a recent one, say Burning by Thomas Bradshaw. To many ears the idea is abhorrent.
sitkack
They take pictures and make posters for upcoming shows? Why not trailers? I think because video production of plays is difficult, their time scales are compressed often still tweaking things directly before opening night. You would pretty much have to dedicate 1 or 2 hrs of the entire casts time just for filming enough footage for a 30 second spot. It is interesting but I think difficult. If you can have a small crew, not take much time and get an edit out quickly. You might be able to charge at most maybe 2k for a fully edited trailer. Probably more on the 1k or less scale.

http://www.broadway.com/

xer0
Probably the trailer, as we think of it in the movies, is too expensive. Trailers are shown to and amortized across a national audience, and I assume are placed in front of movies where the audience will have a positive response.

That said, I see static local ads in the discount theaters. I suppose a theater owner would show any ad that was paid for, but most movie theaters are chains and probably make large deals for the trailers, just like they do for the movies.

Or something.

mjs00
I'd prefer no trailers at movies, or really make them trail the film for folks that might want to see them.
martingordon
I developed a site called StageGrade (http://www.stagegrade.com) that aggregates theatre reviews.

We hope to at least get around the problem of having to overly rely on one or a few professional critics' reviews by aggregating them all and also by allowing users to leave their own reviews which are given equal visibility to the critic reviews.

SHOwnsYou
There are a lot of trailers made for Broadway. Even tours of Broadway shows have trailers advertising when a show is coming to a city near you.

A lot of plays (not musicals) might not have trailers, I don't follow plays as I do musicals.

But I suspect the reason there are fewer commercials available to a wider audience is actually due to the type of audience they want to attract. Neither theater owners nor performers/actors want the typical movie-goer to be the audience screaming, talking on their cell phone, or generally doing anything against the rules. At a Broadway show excessive phone use or talking can get you kicked out. Trying to take a picture often will get you kicked out.