Free Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales From the New Abnormal in the Movie Business by Lynda Obst Page A

auditorium and made it a gift to Kaliningrad.
    “It was really pretty cool. And of course all of Kaliningrad came, and it was a very wonderful, warm moment to see people who had been living under Soviet oppression and denied access to so many films, now hearing it in Dolby.
    “It was an incredible event—to see these sailors who understood their role in the process but also were just so amazed to see this fantastic presentation. And then we went to Moscow, because as long as we were there, what the hell? In Moscow at the time, there was only one state-of-the-art theater. It was built not because the market demanded it, but because Kodak wanted to build a flagship to enhance their brand and their status.
    “So they built this beautiful state-of-the-art theater that was well ahead of the market and well ahead of the audience, and it became the place to go. In Moscow it was like the equivalent of going to the Metropolitan Opera. People would actually dress up, and it was a very sort of elegant place to go regardless of what movie was playing.
    “From that point, because of Titanic, Russia has become one of the biggest markets in the world, and it took not even a decade—closer to five or six years—for the market to open up. It was one of those moments in time, because of glasnost and all the changes in the Soviet Union and all of the investment and capital that became available—it became, and still is, one of the most lucrative markets. It went from nothing to one of the top five markets in five years. ”
    As you can see from Jim’s pivotal anecdote, these new markets were and still are being created in real time as their countries’ economies go through epochal transitions. In these vast, formerly communist territories, theaters are opening where none were before, and yuan and rubles are being spent with abandon by former peasant kids wearing 3D glasses as our state-of-the-art special effects blow up creatures and cars in their happy faces.
    This new reality was created by what the economists call “the emerging markets.” My afternoon with Jim Gianopulos showed me how these new markets emerged so quickly, and the long-term impact that emergence was having on our bottom line. Jim began to explain:
    “Here, people go to the movies roughly four to five times a year. In Europe, the average is about two times per year. In places like Japan, it’s once a year. So you can imagine if you took the eighty to ninety million people of Japan and projected them to the level of U.S. moviegoing, you would have five times the market. That’s what’s happening in various parts of the world. That’s what happened in Russia, that’s what happened in India, that’s what happened in China. All of this massive growth continues. What’s really changed, particularly in the last decade, is that whether you callit globalization or the gradual interaction of cultures all over the world, markets have developed to the point that people are enjoying more frequent moviegoing in places where the infrastructure has been built and is being built. China used to be completely closed off. There was nothing. It grew 30 percent last year, and 400 percent over the past five years.”
    This is what our kings are doing tonight. Thinking chopsticks. And caviar.
    •  •  •
    Brad Grey, the chairman of Paramount, went to Moscow for the first Russian premiere of an American movie, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third and most successful in the action/sci-fi franchise. It is a complicated saga, which I struggled to understand, involving a JFK cover-up of a crash landing on the moon in ’61, why we really went to the moon in ’69, a plot to build a space bridge from Earth to the moon’s dark side (finally destroyed by something called the Control Pillar) and robots called Decepticons planning to dominate Earth. Russians adored it to the tune of $45.1 million. In his speech there in 2011, Grey declared, “Ten years ago, Russia only had a