Friday, December 28, 2007

Distribution Quandary

Does anyone know a surefire way of finding out if a movie was released theatrically in a given calendar year in the US? If so please share. I find that IMDB has too many errors to trust in this regard (and also: absolutely no specifics as to the where ...so it might be a festival rather than a regular release). Sites like movieweb and coming soon and others do seem a little vague too, particularly when it comes to indies or foreign films with tiny distributors.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Box office mojo? You can either look at the top 150 list (scrolling down, I guess), or you can look at the releases month by month under "full schedule", going backwards.

Michael B. said...

Kin is right. Box office mojo is the best bet. You can search the movie title, or if there is a popular actor, actress, director, writer or producer you can search them individually. It's the best bet.

NATHANIEL R said...

yeah unfortunately that still doesn't work. They apparently don't cover one week releases in LA (for Oscar qualifications) or tiny arthouse things. I saw that JONES was playing here in NYC and it's not on their site. And also 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS is not listed as having opened so unless it's qualifying run was cancelled...

argh. so hard to find this info.

Glenn Dunks said...

I would hazard a guess and say the films official websites would have sufficient information.

Glenn Dunks said...

Exact.Same.Time.

freeeaky.

NATHANIEL R said...

that's also thwarting me. official sites are very bad about updating. the other day I saw one from like 2003 that was like "coming soon" -ha ha. i can't remember waht it was now, dang.

but yes. Like Fräulein for example. Loved it at the Indiana Festival and it was supposed to get released this fall but then i heard from the company that they were postponing it and the site says coming soon and IMDB says it already came out in November.

ARGH.

and that's just a typical example.

also 4 MONTHS 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS was supposed to have a qualifying run starting dec 21st but nowhere can I find information that that actually happened.

sometimes the interwebs just aren't as handy as they're supposed to be.

NicksFlickPicks said...

This article from GreenCine Daily confirms the one-week qualifying run for 4 Months.

I usually use BoxOfficeMojo and Dark Horizons, but searching the New York Times film review engine is usually a good way to see if a film opened in NYC, since they tend to review everything. I'm not sure if the LA Times has a comparable feature.

jeff_v said...

I usually go by this page on Mike D'Angelo's site. It's only NYC releases though.

Anonymous said...

Nathaniel, 4 months.. did indeed have it's release. It's eligible in all categories at the oscars (it's on teh reminder list of eligible films).

FWIW.