As someone who lives close to the area, I’ve been a regular at Cinemapolis since my high school days. So, when I saw that the Rose Scholars would be given a tour of the theater, I jumped at the chance.

Manager Brett Bossard gave a thorough tour and presentation of the cinema and its inner mechanisms. What I found most interesting was his explanation of the differences between saturated market release and “platforming.”

The saturation method of release would be the method used for movies played in theaters such as Regal Cinemas, in which large film marketing companies invest in advertisement and build up anticipation for a certain movie, an example of one of these movies being Batman vs. Superman. We would see during the week of the release a high grossing box office, but these sales would sharply plummet during the second week. This is due to the movie being designed for mass appeal and not critic appeal and the poor ratings driving customers away.

Platforming is considered to be the opposite of the saturation method, and the movies are designed for critic appeal. They are typically marketed by smaller independent film companies or branches from larger companies specifically designed to find critically-acclaimed movies, such as Fox Searchlight. A film would first be shown to critics in select theaters in larger cities such as New York and Los Angeles and, upon receiving good reviews from the critics and thus garnering buzz and anticipation from the moviegoers, would then be released to other cities, and then to smaller regions like Ithaca. The movies released would be the typical “Oscar-worthy film,” and these are the films shown in Cinemapolis.

As a movie addict, I typically get my fix from what Cinemapolis has to offer.