Keystone Art Cinema has had a weekly turnover of 31 percent. Typically, the longer a film is exhibited, the less money it brings in for movie houses. (Frank Espich / The Star)

Empty seats during opening weekend usually means a quick exit for movies. (Steve Sanchez / The Star)

Tim Roth appears in filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola's "Youth Without Youth," a movie that was dropped at local theaters after a week of poor attendance. (Photo provided by Sony Pictures Classics)

Distributors keep moving up the dates of video releases. So a movie, such as "Shooter," starring Mark Wahlberg, can hit video stores 10 weeks after it was seen on theater screens. Such pressure discourages a long theater engagement. (Photo provided by Paramount Pictures)

Ron Keedy says that if small films don't fare well in big cities, they often don't make it to his Southside theater. (Tom Klubens / Freelance For Indy.com)

The star power of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman has given "The Bucket List" great staying power at the box office. (Photo provided by Warner Bros.)

"Sleepwalking," with Nick Stahl (from left), AnnaSophia Robb and Charlize Theron did not do well at Keystone Art Cinema, despite! Theron's star presence. (Photo provided by Overture Films)

"Juno," starring heretofore little-known Ellen Page, is steaming through its fourth month in release. Ditto for "The Bucket List," a septuagenarian guy tear-jerker.

Meanwhile, Francis Ford Coppola, perhaps the most celebrated filmmaker of the last half-century, sees his film "Youth Without Youth" disappear from Indianapolis screens after just a single week.

And none of the nominees for the best foreign language Oscar has yet played here -- though the winner, "The Counterfeiters," is scheduled to open April 11.

What gives?

Why is it that some films stay in theaters from season to season, while others are gone before you even knew they were playing, and some flicks never touch down at local cinemas at all?

The simple answer, of course, is money. Movies that sell well get a wider release and tend to stay around longer.

But consolidation of media coverage and shifting patterns in the exhibition industry are making it harder for smaller films to get traction, even as the overall number of independent films increases -- 530 in 2007, up 6.percent from the previous year, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

"Unfortunately with 'Youth Without Youth,' no one showed up," said Ted Mundorff, CEO of Landmark Theatres, a cinema chain specializing in independent film, including the Keystone Art Cinema, which played the movie.

"The reality is films are voted on on a daily basis. Whether they stay around or not is predicated on how much business they do," Mundorff said.

Other movies that fared poorly at Indianapolis' Landmark theater despite having a big name on the bill include "Margot at the Wedding," starring Nicole Kidman, and "Sleepwalking," with Charlize Theron.

The obvious conclusion is that these movies just weren't very good. All three received generally poor reviews.

But summer blockbusters often take a critical beating and still score at the box office. And even some indie films, such as "Napoleon Dynamite," become hits in spite of, rather than because of, what critics had to say.

Why one film scores while another one flops remains the great mystery of Hollywood. As screenwriter William Goldman ("All the President's Men") famously wrote about the movie biz, "Nobody knows anything."

"It's the fickleness of the audience," said Larry Thomas, a booker who finds films for theaters across the Midwest, including one in Franklin. "An audience seems to know what it wants to see before it goes to see it."

No gradual rollout

Changes in the movie industry help explain why films don't linger at the local cinema as they once did.

Up until the mid-1970s, most movies were released in a gradual rollout. They would open in a few theaters. If they did well, more screens would be added in more markets, and so forth. They rarely played on more than a few hundred screens at any given time, meaning theaters could hold onto a film for a long time and still make money.

"We used to have pictures and we'd let them get their legs. You put them in an auditorium and let them build their audience," said Ron Keedy, owner of Key Cinemas, an independent art-house cinema on the Southside. "They don't do that anymore because of the financial structures of the pictures."

Blockbusters such as "Jaws" and "Star Wars" changed everything. Now, mainstream films are released en masse, sometimes on 5,000 screens or more. Success is measured by opening-weekend grosses.

This is often accompanied by a large national ad campaign. Such marketing is hugely expensive -- sometimes rivaling the cost to produce the film -- and the pressure is on to make money quickly before the advertising runs out.

"They may plan to end the advertising and promotion after one or two weeks in the marketplace," said Russ Nunley, vice president of marketing and communications for the Regal Entertainment Group, one of the largest cinema chains.

Another factor is video. Since DVDs became commonplace nearly a decade ago, total proceeds from video sales and rentals have outstripped theatrical grosses. So distributors keep moving up the video release date -- "Shooter", starring Mark Wahlberg, hit video stores 10 weeks after movie theaters -- and there's no incentive for a film to hang around.

"A theater engagement essentially acts as a trailer for DVD, cable and eventually Internet release," said Ken Eisen, president of Shadow Distribution, which handles small films such as "A Man Named Pearl."

Finally, new financial arrangements between studios and exhibitors create a disincentive for theaters to keep a film for months on end.

It used to be that studios and exhibitors split the proceeds of ticket sales on a sliding scale that favored the studio in the early going, and the theater owner later on. For example, they might split the money 90/10 the first week, with the studio picking up the lion's share. Their ratio would decrease over time to the point that theaters kept the majority.

This created a system in which a theater could make more money after a film had been out for a while, even though fewer tickets were sold.

Now, it's increasingly more common for distributors to demand a set percentage. Theater owners get more up front, but make less as business dwindles. So they're inclined to always want new films.

"Studios always want their films on the screen, no matter what the level of business is. But the exhibitor can't pay the light bills if people aren't coming. If a film isn't doing well, it needs to rotate out," said Landmark's Mundorff.

Over the past one-year period, Keystone Art Cinema played 113 movies, or more than two new releases per week on its seven screens -- a weekly turnover of 31 percent.

Industry cutbacks

As to why some smaller or foreign films never make it to Indianapolis screens, blame cutbacks in the distribution and media industries.

Distribution offices used to be spread all across the country. Film bookers had hands-on knowledge of regional markets and knew what would play there.

Now, with the exception of a few smaller distributors, they're clustered almost exclusively in New York City and Los Angeles. If a film doesn't play well there, it likely won't get a chance to reach the "flyover" states.

"All these tiny little film companies, they want to open in New York and L.A. first, then Dallas and Chicago, because that really determines whether they're going to continue on with that picture past those cities," Keedy said.

Internet promotion of movies is on the rise, but so far it's not on the verge of supplanting traditional advertising.

"It's very unclear whether you can in most cases successfully market films through the Internet, though obviously you have to include it in your thinking," Eisen said.

Reviews have always played an outsized role in smaller movies getting attention and finding an audience. Because of a downturn in the newspaper industry, mid-size and even large papers have been shedding film critics at a prodigious rate -- including Detroit, Atlanta, Tampa, Jacksonville, Cincinnati and Indianapolis.

"Newspapers are increasingly cutting down on local reviews. And so reviews often just get picked up from wire (services) in large-size markets," Eisen said.

But with even some New York and Los Angeles newspapers cutting staff-written criticism -- Newsday recently cut its entire film department, two critics and an editor -- it's getting harder for regional papers to find even wire reviews to run.

"There's a lot of film that comes through Indianapolis," said Landmark's Mundorff. "The level of support -- we're trying to build that and get more people interested in smaller films. But it's a challenge, and it's always been a challenge as far as educating folks what's out there.

"Reviews are an important component of the process. So when we miss a review in the newspaper, it hurts us as well."