Madfilm Meetup Recap: 44 Features in 2014, Average Tomatometer 85%

Drive In Caravan 1 — Setting up camp at the Drive-In Caravan in June.

Madfilm Meetup: 2014 Recap

We attended 42 screenings in 2014. The experiment will continue and expand in 2015.

As Jake and I assemble our Top 20 lists for 2014, it is also a good time to look back at our first year of Madfilm Meetups. As part of our mission to encourage attendance at great movies on the big screen in Madison, we attempted to meetup at a theater every Tuesday starting back in February. As the experiment continued, we added some alternate Meetups, like Drive-In Caravans and Bollywood Matinees. With one year’s experience under our belt, we plan to expand publicity for the Madfilm Meetups and to include post-screening meetings at local restaurants and bars in 2015, so stay tuned.

One thing Jake and I wondered when we started this experiment was whether Madison’s theatrical market could make such an effort worthwhile. The key was to maintain quality by just skipping weeks where nothing worth seeing was playing. While our personal schedules made it impossible to go every Tuesday, most weeks we were able to find things that were worth our time and effort. We never expected everyone to join us every week; our goal was to encourage readers to attend a local screening at least once a month. Now that we’ve completed 2014, we’re confident that we can expand our efforts and keep Meetup quality high and improve attendance in 2015.

DJ Real Jaguar — DJ The Real Jaguar spins at the Sundance Rooftop Bar before our BOYHOOD Meetup in August

The other thing Jake and I discovered in 2014 was that many Madisonians go to the movies on Tuesday nights, thanks in large part to the $5 admissions at Marcus Theaters. But we also noticed that even when the Marcus parking lots and lobbies were packed, many of our screenings had mediocre attendance. While we have nothing against blockbusters (we attended several for Meetups in 2014), we hope to tap into the large Tuesday night audience and encourage other options available.

We’ve been very grateful for the enthusiasm that Sundance Cinemas have shown for our efforts, both on social media and during the Meetups themselves. When their Rooftop Bar re-opens with good weather in 2015, we hope to follow up on our Boyhood experiment with DJ The Real Jaguar spinning before screenings. And we will continue to support their Screening Room calendar this spring, especially the Movie Guy post-screening discussions with Rob Thomas. The 2014 Madfilm Meetup theater breakdown was:

Sundance Cinemas: 14
Marcus Point: 8
Marcus Eastgate: 6
AMC Star 18: 6
HWY 18 Outdoor Theater: 4 (2 double features)
MMoCA Spotlight Cinema 2
Union South Marquee: 1
Central Library: 1
Camp Randall: 1

Why no UW-Cinematheque? Why so few WUD Films? Part of the answer has to do with our schedules (I can’t make Friday nights) and part of the answer has to do with the ongoing success of the UW-Cinematheque, especially at Madison premieres of new films. As we continue to use social media, especially Facebook Event Pages, to invite new people, we want to make sure first-timers aren’t disappointed by beyond-capacity screenings in 4070 Vilas Hall. (I’m not always sure I’ll be early enough to get a seat, let alone get a seat for other invitees.) Once we hit the sweet spot of maximizing invites while accurately anticipating actual turnouts, we’ll figure out how to incorporate the UW-Cinematheque’s great lineup into the Madfilm Meetup schedule. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to build an audience of those who can make it out Tuesday nights (as mentioned above, there’s a lot of them) so that those same people might perhaps venture to the UW-Cinematheque on their own over the weekend. And as always, a significant percentage of our local reviews in 2015 will be for UW-Cinematheque and WUD Film programming.

Madfilm Meetup Tomatometer ratings averaged 85% overall, and 90% when excluding Drive-In Caravans.

We ended up seeing a lot of very good films, several of which will appear on our upcoming Top 20s for 2014. Tomatometer ratings exclude Bollywood films and other events not listed on Rotten Tomatoes, but looking back I’m actually surprised that we managed to keep the quality that high from week to week. Of course, one shouldn’t depend on the Tomatometer too much. Those low Drive-In Caravan numbers don’t take into account how much fun drive-ins are. One of the lowest rated films, Luc Besson’s Lucy, was well worth seeing, and we hope to include more films that provoke critical divisions in 2015.

Check out the list below if you want to catch up on what we attended in 2014. Tomatometer ratings are provided in parentheses after the titles. You can help support the Madison Film Forum by checking out the films on Amazon Instant Video, but we’ve also provided other links to help you find the titles on other streaming resources and at local DVD venues.