Gen Z moviegoing habits, the magic of discovering trailers and the lure of nostalgia for simpler times were among the subjects raised in a lively roundtable of top film and streaming marketing leaders held Wednesday as part of Variety’s annual Entertainment Marketing Summit.
The five executives also chopped it up about the “evolutionary process” that explains why video games have emerged as such vital source material for movies. And they debated Tom Rothman’s call issued last week at CinemaCon in Las Vegas when the Sony Pictures chief urged exhibitors (and studios) to trim the number of ads and trailers that precede movie screenings.
Matt Donnelly, Variety’s chief correspondent, moderated what has become an annual tradition for the summit, this time featuring Dwight Caines, president of domestic marketing for Universal Pictures; Josh Goldstine, president of global marketing and distribution for Paramount Pictures; Rebecca Kearey, executive VP and head of international marketing, distribution and business operations for Searchlight Pictures; Blair Rich, chief marketing and commercial officer for Legendary Entertainment; and Shauna Spenley, global chief marketing officer for direct-to-consumer at Warner Bros. Discovery.
“The data suggests that younger moviegoers — Gen Alpha and Gen Z — are becoming fans of the theatrical experience, the in-person experience. They’re driving some of that box office steadiness. We just need to make that habit deeper and stronger among them,” said Dwight Caines, president of domestic marketing for Universal Pictures, during the session in Beverly Hills.
Blair Rich, chief marketing and commercial officer for Legendary Entertainment, cited research indicating that Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers are more frequent moviegoers (going 7 times a year) than Baby Boomers (5 x) or Millennials (6 x). Rich noted that younger demos are hungry for nostalgia rooted in the 1990s and earlier times, before smartphones and social media and WiFi, et al. They’re craving glimpses of a world they’ve heard about, but never known.
“It’s the swipe before you wipe generation, right? It’s the first generation that grew up never being off a screen, and they have a need for connected social experiences,” Rich said. “What the research shows is they’re choosing movies as social experiences, as opposed to choosing it as something else to do.”
Caines pointed to Universal’s socko success with “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” as coming in part because of the Super Mario Bros. franchise’s multi-generational appeal. The property is 40 years old, after all.
Universal Pictures’ Dwight Caines (Photo by Savion Washington/Variety)
Variety via Getty Images
“If you’re a parent who grew up on it, you can now take the whole household,” Caines said. “If you look at the success of PG movies, that’s driving a significant amount of where our box office success is coming from.”
Donnelly pointed to the sharp rise in Hollywood’s interest in video game adaptations amid softness in the performance of comic book and superhero fare. This sparked an anthropological observation from Goldstine.
“It was sort of an evolutionary process by which these games really mean something” to a generation of consumers, he said.
The biggest game franchises are enormously valuable for movie marketing because they have well-established fan communities, Goldstine said, citing the Minecraft world and Activision’s “Call of Duty,” which is being adapted by Paramount Pictures as a feature that was hand-picked by David Ellison, the company’s 43-year-old CEO.
“These are things that are deeply important [to consumers], and they have that sense of community around them. It is the IP of our moment in terms of that next phase of things,” Goldstine said.
Spenley worked in gaming for Riot Games before joining WBD in 2024. She spoke from experience on how much time game enthusiasts spend with their favorite titles.
“The players of League of Legends — they would spend thousands of hours in that game. When you go to a fan base that big and work on something that is that important to them, you really have to take it quite seriously,” Spenley said.
Legendary and Warner Bros. Pictures learned a great deal about reaching and motivating gaming communities with its gamble last year on “A Minecraft Movie.” The way fans embraced the film and made the moviegoing experience a social media moment was revelatory, Rich said.
“We hadn’t seen anything quite like that before, absolutely talking about this as a connected social experience,” she said. “It’s why marketing is changing. It’s why we have to do much more experiential marketing and connect people, whether it’s on streaming or with theatrical.”
Rich also drew a parallel between the younger audience’s appetite for retro looks at recent historical events (see: FX’s “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette”) and broader social and cultural shifts spurred by technology.
“You have to feel these points of connection that are socialized, because this kind of constant disconnection is starting to numb people. That’s why they’re seeking something else,” Rich said. She added that Legendary and Paramount’s upcoming video game adaptation “Street Fighter” is set in 1993, and rated PG-13.
Paramount Pictures’ Josh Goldstine, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Shauna Spenley and Legendary Entertainment’s Blair Rich (Photo by Savion Washington/Variety)
Savion Washington
“This kind of nostalgia is a kind of cultural magnet for people. Going back to a time where you used a throwaway camera and used to have to take it to the pharmacy to develop your pictures,” Rich said. “People are really craving what used to be.”
Spenley co-signed on that sentiment, citing HBO Max’s experience over the past 14 months with “The Pitt.” The Emmy-winning medical drama, toplined by “ER” veteran Noah Wyle, marked a conscious effort to reinvent a network TV-like procedural for a streaming platform. The series rolled out 15 episodes for Season 1 on a weekly basis – significantly more episodes than a typical streaming season order of 8-10. And it is designed to recur on an annual basis a la traditional network series.
“What you’re seeing are these new patterns. We’ve seen it with ‘The Pitt’ and the habituality of people wanting to come every week and saying that they’re grateful for that. I mean, we would not have expected 10 years ago that people would be grateful for that, but that is in fact the case,” Spenley said.
She added that the audience for “The Pitt” wants to see new episodes on an annual basis, like TV of old. “They don’t really want to wait a couple years for every installment,” Spenley said.
Kearey touched on a similar theme of returning to form in describing how Searchlight Pictures has adapted in the post-post-COVID era.
“I think a lot of what we went through during COVID and after COVID was this inflation on budgets. And now we’re trying to get back to the model that was so successful. I feel like we’re getting a grip on it,” Kearey said. “We have a film later this year, Martin McDonagh’s ‘Wild Horse Nine,’ with Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich. It’s going to be a fun for everyone.”
Searchlight Pictures’ Rebecca Kearey (Photo by Savion Washington/Variety)
Variety via Getty Images
Kearey echoed her colleagues in expressing optimism that the film industry is rebounding with help from younger moviegoers who prize the experience.
“We love our model. We love our auteur filmmakers. They are our brand. Everybody else here works with different kinds of brands, but our filmmakers are our brands. That’s kind of our bread and butter as a business,” she said.
Kearey also expressed some reserve on Rothman’s call to shorten the pre-screening block of ads and trailers.
“I think it’s a really fine line, because trailers are still the best way you’re capturing someone in the church they want to be in, watching the movie they want to watch, and they are a habitual movie goer often, that’s likely. So of course, as distributors, we’re going to want to have our trailers in front of movies and as many trailers as possible,” Kearey said. “I actually love sitting through all the trailers and the ads — that’s just me.”
Caines shared Kearey’s view. He suggested that the volume of ads in the pre-show may naturally shrink as box office receipts go up.
“It’s really about keeping the business alive, investing in movie going, getting people back into theaters so that the revenue derived from the box office can maybe replace some of the revenue that’s cluttering up the screen,” he said.
Caines pointed out a key difference between experiencing a movie trailer in a theater compared to viewing it online or via social platforms.
“In the old days, a trailer would ‘occur’ to you when you sat down in your seat. You didn’t know what you were going to see. You didn’t click, oh, ‘Mario’, right? It would occur. It would reveal itself. And there’s something magical about that. So I would agree that we want to retain that magic,” Caines said.
This made Goldstine fairly swoon.
“Discovery is the greatest experience in the world. Discovery is like falling in love. It’s just that moment of completely finding something,” Goldstine observed.
“So how do we do that?” Caines asked of the SRO industry crowd. “Go to the movies, people.”
(Pictured top: Universal’s Dwight Caines, Legendary’s Blair Rich, Warner Bros. Discovery’s Shauna Spenley, Paramount’s Josh Goldstine, Searchlight’s Rebecca Kearey and Variety‘s Matt Donnelly)
Leave a Reply