Extinguishing Spotlights: the Uncertain Future of Cinematic Heritage in London’s Leicester Square

London movie theatres have been considered some of the finest palaces to house the moving image. Even the tiles adorning the Northern and Piccadilly lines at Leicester Square tube station depict the iconic film perforations along its platforms. As the focal point of movie marketing, the fetishisation of stars and directors in the numerous film premieres hosted along the red carpets in the square have been recorded and disseminated worldwide via print and broadcast for decades. Today, the huge hoardings (now digitized) still attempt to entice those milling past to venture inside for the latest Hollywood blockbusters. However, as cinema attendance has waned the square has had to respond to the changes in public demand for a wider choice and different kinds of experience. Many of the former cinemas have now been multiplexed; their singular former grandeur stripped in favour of modernist simplicity and choice. Now in a much more worrying trend, parts of the square (including the Odeon West End) are in the process of being fully demolished. Audience demands for variety and spectacle plus industry developments in digital technologies and new trends in experiences such as giant screen formats, 3D films, and more immersive sound have fuelled the need for change to keep up with demand and profit. Using Leicester Square as a case study, this paper will explore the need of cinema holding companies to evolve in an increasing multi-platform era of choice. The question is at what cost to preservation and heritage is this current strategy having on our national and collective cinematic history?

Marketing and consumption of art products: the movie industry

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the importance, assigned by audiences, of factors such as people, movie features, script, price, promotion, and distribution channels (defined as a movie marketing mix) on the audience’s buying intentions, as well as the impact of their buying intentions on word of mouth (WOM). In addition, the intention is to explore the relationship between the preference and frequency of people’s cultural event attendance with their buying intention and the relationship between people with extroverted personalities and WOM. Design/methodology/approach The data were collected from 904 valid surveys conducted in Beyoglu, one of the important centres for the culture and art life of the Istanbul. Findings The results show that promotion, actor or actress, and diversity of distribution channels have a positive effect on people’s purchase intention. In addition, the frequency of attendance to cultural events can be determinative of the audience and helpful for industry professionals. Originality/value Although there have been a number of studies that examine the simple relationships among some of these variables (movie marketing mix, attendance, purchase intention, WOM, extraversion), there is still a gap in the literature with regard to these variables in an integrated framework. Considering these variables in the same model and analysing the effects of each dimension individually provides a better explanation of consumer purchase intention and post-purchase behaviour in the movie industry. This study extends the previous research by incorporating the concept of movie marketing and consumption by improving the scale with data collected in Istanbul, Turkey.