Hannover House Inc (HHSE)

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Re: Change in Direction

As you quote from the recent meeting minutes:

As we continue to grow as an independent distributor, we will be focusing our release activities on more significant titles with greater commercial appeal.

And your comment:

At the Jan 15 meeting it seemed TDGI would stick to lower budget films and open in select areas for starters, it seems like looking for bigger productions.

w6w, I thought they were going to look for good movies regardless of stars or other factors. That’s why I was excited about Girlfriend. Even though it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, from the trailer it looked like it might be good.

I like these guys but it’s hard not to get the feeling that they are moving around from one approach to the next without really having a solid plan. From movies with stars, to good movies, to "more significant titles with greater commercial appeal" whatever that might mean. I wonder how they're going to judge the "commercial appeal." That sounds very close to the approach that got them into Twelve.

This is at about minute 20 from the SHM:

“At the same time that we were learning these painful lessons about theatrical releasing, we were also watching a film that we passed on at Sundance, called Winter’s Bone. And the conventional wisdom if you’re a DVD company or a book publisher and you’re just getting your toe in the water of theatrical releases is, “Hey lets go for films with big stars.” And we went for Twelve. Racing Dreams didn’t have stars because it was a documentary. Winter’s Bone didn’t have stars at all, and we thought it was a great film but we just thought, “Oh, gee, maybe we’re jaded, maybe we know too much about the Ozarks, maybe we like it more than the average audience will like it because, you know, we know people like this.” And so we didn’t really pursue that film. And as – and what they did, that we think is a really, really smart strategy for certain kinds of films, is they opened New York exclusively. And they had two screens. I think they had the Lincoln Plaza and they had the Angelica Film Center, and they did huge business. And then they expanded to Chicago and L.A., so they had New York, L.A., Chicago. Continued to do huge business. And over the period of the next three months, they expanded from two screens in New York to about 150 screens, and they’ve ended up playing all across the country. They did about $6 million at the box office with less than a million dollars expenditure, at least that’s what we’re told. Cause we don’t know exactly what they spent but we were told by somebody involved in the production that that’s what they spent. And then they came out on video through Lionsgate and it was a huge, huge video release. So we’re sitting here saying, “OK, you know what, that could have been us and we thought because there weren’t stars that it was not a smart move to do.” But the reality is if you have a good movie and you put it in the right theatre, you’ll start to create some buzz, you’ll start to create some word of mouth and then you can expand, or stop if necessary, before you go to DVD and Blu-ray. And that’s kind of what we’re going to be talking to you about for 2011.”