Edward Jay Epstein on why Hollywood keeps remaking old movies:
"The key to a movie's success is the level of awareness that exists for the project well in advance of the advertising blitz that takes place in the week or so preceding the actual release date. The studios carefully track this prior awareness via the telephone polls supplied weekly by the National Research Group, a part of Nielsen Media Research. From this data, a studio can tell the extent to which different segments of the moviegoing population—divided by age and sex into four "quadrants"—are aware of a particular upcoming movie. The most important audiences are those in the under-25 males quadrant, since they are the easiest to turn out for opening weekend. With franchises and remakes, the awareness in the under-25 male group approaches 100 percent; with video-game- and TV-based movies, it is often over 90 percent. But with original stories the awareness level, even buoyed by well-planted gossip items in the entertainment media, is usually not much more than 60 percent. Such an awareness gap means that a large proportion of teen eyeballs, even if glued to their TV sets, might not recognize the fleeting ads as a go-message for a movie opening that weekend. If so, the studio's multimillion-dollar ad campaign may miss its mark."
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