“My roots are in exhibition, and coming from movie theatres definitely helps in doing this job,” says Mike Polydoros, who not only handles in-theatre marketing at Lionsgate, but also oversees print control, digital cinema and related aspects of operations at the successful mini-major.

“I have built up film before,” he assures the readers of Film Journal International. “So if a theatre manager says to me, ‘The print arrived too late, I can’t get it ready,’ I know whether that’s a load of crap,” he laughs.

Although the current executive VP of distribution operations and exhibitor relations admits to not having built up a print in about 25 years, “I can still do it in 25 minutes. We also put up posters, put together standees and hung up mobiles, you name it, build up, tear down… We did it all.”

After some 13-plus years on the distribution side—beginning back in 1996 with Live Entertainment back before it was bought up by Bain Capital and became Artisan Entertainment, which, in turn, was sold and merged with Lionsgate in 2004—Polydoros still feels the love. “Now that Lionsgate has up to 18 titles a year, we have a lot of films and campaigns to take care of and making sure that every single one gets the love and attention that it needs.” Polydoros is ably assisted in this mission by exhibitor-relations VP Demetri Panos and coordinator Amanda Rufener.

For his start in the exhibition business at 15 years old, Polydoros couldn’t have picked a better place than Grauman’s Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard (now home to the American Cinematheque), working for his uncle who was the manager there. “My dad came home one day and said, ‘By the way, you start work this weekend, your uncle needs an usher.’ The first movie I worked on was Moment by Moment with John Travolta and Lily Tomlin, but I was also an usher there during The Empire Strikes Back. We were the first theatre ever to do a marathon showing with it for 144 straight hours.”

Over the next eight years, Polydoros worked for UA Theatres in a variety of locations across the greater Los Angeles area: UA Marina Del Rey and North Hollywood before becoming a manager at the now-extinct UA Capital Theatre in Glendale. “I also ran the UA Egyptian in Westwood Village for about three-and-a-half years, which very sadly just shuttered in its current incarnation as the Mann Festival Theatre."

During that time, managing a theatre “was a much different game,” Polydoros notes. “On a weekday, even in Westwood, it was only myself, a cashier in the box office and a candy person. You were tearing tickets, starting the movie and going to the bank. You were running the whole operation.”

Also in those olden days, “in-theatre marketing was pretty much an afterthought,” he continues. “There were no exhibitor-relations departments at the studios to encourage trailer placement. The only trailers that were shipped with the print were those that were attached. Anything else was sent out separately to those theatres where they thought the film would be playing. No one contacted theatre managers, it was just assumed that they were being shown…”

Sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s, “the emphasis turned to the fact that trailers are a very integral part of marketing. One has to remember, we have the precise demographic that we are looking for in any given theatre audience. We know who they are, what kind of movie they are watching and, most importantly, we know that they spent money to go to the movies because they are sitting right there and now.” For Polydoros, those are all “key reasons why trailer placement is so critical to what happens with a movie.” From that realization, he believes, “developed the idea of in-theatre marketing with a campaign that actually targets moviegoers. You tie together your trailer, one-sheet, standee and, of course, any other kind of promotional activities that you can get done.”



Consequently, “here at Lionsgate, we try to always concentrate on who our target audience is.” Using January’s Daybreakers as an example, Polydoros found “it very clear that we had a vampire movie, with sci-fi and a little bit on the horror side. So, all of our materials were geared towards titles that attract that same kind of audience. Hopefully, by the time Daybreakers opened, they would have seen at least some of our materials. Other studios may approach things a little bit differently with more of a shotgun-blast approach, but Lionsgate is very focused and precisely target-oriented in what we do.”

Aiming for as many eyeballs as possible on any given weekend, “and it doesn’t matter who those eyeballs are as long as they are eyeballs,” he opines, often results in studios wanting to have their trailers played with whichever movie is expected to be the highest grosser. By disregarding whether film and trailer actually fit in genre and mood, Polydoros feels some people are mixing “peanut butter and onions: It doesn’t necessarily go together.”

At Lionsgate, instead, “we’re never going to make a request to exhibition that is out of line and we always respect that circuits really want to keep control of their field…” For example, he says, “we are not going to take The Spy Next Door, which is clearly a family movie, with something that is clearly not, because it wouldn’t make any sense. You can do a disservice to your film too, if you put it in front of the wrong crowd. We are always trying to make sure that the right people are seeing the trailer that was specifically crafted for them.”

Another word of caution stems from the fact that “you can now have trailers for a film that is not coming out for a year. If you keep those up too long, it can become stale. The last thing you want is people saying, ‘I have seen this like a gazillion times now, I am not going to see the movie.’ It has to stay fresh.”

After all these years, Polydoros’ job remains fresh too. “I am a very lucky guy in that I get to talk about movies all day long,” Polydoros declares. “To me, all of our promotions are fun ones and we always get to be innovative and come up with interesting ideas.” The Blair Witch Project was a particular favorite from his time at Artisan Entertainment: “That was a kick. I will always remember that!” More recently, Precious was “great because it was such a challenge. We had what people perceived as a very tough movie, but at the same time something that we knew to be such an extraordinary movie. The fact that we were able to convince exhibitors to sign on to Precious and back it in the tremendous way that all they did is truly a testament to the group that we have here. Being able to break through and get that movie to such a gross and level of awards anticipation is just amazing.”

What it all comes down to is communication and organization, he says. “We don’t fly by the seat of our pants here. Everything is very calculated… Mapping out in-theatre marketing is the only way to do it. We are planning for the next 12 months, if not more, in terms of in-theatre trailer targets, when we want to roll out one-sheets and what kind of promotions we would like to offer theatres and managers. If we don’t plan in advance, we are going to find ourselves in quite a lot of trouble,” he chuckles.

To communicate those ideas, incentives and initiatives, Lionsgate deploys an e-mail data base and a dedicated website, www.lgexr.com. “We send newsletters and updates, not only with our marketing and materials but also with interesting things about our films. Just last week, for instance, Kick Ass was named the best film at Harry Knowles’ Butt-Numb-A-Thon, beating out Avatar as the audience favorite (www.cinematical.com/2009/12/14/shutter-island-kick-ass-butt-numb-a-thon-1138). So we sent out an e-mail blast to let people know here’s a title you may not have heard that much about, but within the fanboy community it’s already getting a great buzz.” Polydoros also promises “aggressive” in-theatre campaigns for that film and such other upcoming titles as Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables and the Katherine Heigl-Ashton Kutcher action comedy Killers.

Internally as well, communication is king. “Everything we do here is done as a team,” Polydoros says of his work with the Lionsgate marketing group. “They’ll come to us with what they want to do in theatres and we’ll say that’s a great idea. Or we’ll come to them with our ideas… The great thing about working here is that everything is cutting-edge. Our marketing people are on the cusp of everything new. They are not afraid of trying something and we’re not burdened with layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy. If there is an idea, it can get done very quickly.”

Of those new ideas, Polydoros is especially excited by digital motion posters. “You can now put something on the poster that was just not possible before. We can take the key art and turn it into something special”—as was the case with The Haunting in Connecticut, where “we could have the ectoplasm actually coming out of the actor’s mouth.  That was fantastic and the theatres loved it. And for the last Saw, we had a version were everybody came together to create the logo. I think these digital poster cases give us something unique to utilize in that premium lobby space. It’s all about impression.”

Impressive as the work is that Mike Polydoros and his team accomplish, he feels credit goes in both directions. “The cool thing about what we do is that it is a true partnership between us and exhibition. We all have the same goal: When we open a film on Friday night, we want the theatre full and they want the theatre full of people too. As long as we strive and work together towards that goal, it’s all good.”