LonelyEveryone forgets about the place with one of the highest concentration of ski hills in the country lol
TL;DR: please focus on what we ARE doing, not what we're NOT doing. There's a massive amount of work to pull a 6-city tour off along with everything else we're doing. Most of our team has been working 60+ hour weeks all summer.
No one at Level 1 has forgotten about the Midwest. There's a million factors that have to go into our decisions for a tour like this.
The simple fact is that we haven't run premieres ourselves outside of SLC/Denver/Bozeman in many years. Every new city we expand into is a calculated risk, because we can only make an educated guess at what the demand for tickets will be. Renting the venues can cost anywhere from 2k-5k. Then we have to add travel costs for our team on top of that, and hope that we'll be able to make that money back in ticket sales. For many reasons, Seattle/Boston/Burlington were the right cities for us this year.
Doubling the size of the tour from 3 cities to 6 is already a big jump. One of the easiest mistakes to make in any business (skiing or not) is trying to get too big too fast. It happened to Jiberish - they barely survived and are still digging out the of debt from opening too many stores too fast. Go watch the documentary "The Rise and Fall of AND1" on Netflix for a bigger example.
Even harder to deal with is the fact that all these movies start coming out on YouTube in October. Parker's movie SOMETHING will be out for free on Oct 2nd. And most of the movies are barely done being edited by mid-September. So we're really looking at a 2 week window to try to book all our tour stops. Its way harder than when we were touring a feature movie that we made, and controlled the drop date in mid-November.
Booking a tour like this with legit venues is really difficult. We're battling bigger acts that have an established reputation in that city, that will charge more for tickets and therefore make the venue more money on their ticketing fees (don't even get me started on the fees). Booking this tour required us to be in conversation with 20 venues across the country at the same time, 3-5 in each city. It's a massive headache with tons of moving parts.
There's a big list of cities we'd love to run these events in. Boone NC, Reno, LA, SF, Portland, Bend, Detroit, Twin Cities, NYC, Boise, Vancouver, Calgary, Innsbruck, London, Stockholm, on and on and on. No one loves running premieres more than us - trust us. But we're not even sure if expanding it into 3 cities is gonna work yet. Time will tell. If we lose money on the tour after spending months putting it together, it's pretty hard to justify bringing it back. It's a labor of love and we're passionate about it, but passion only puts food in our bellies when there's profit that follows. That's life.
I love to hear the requests to bring this to the Midwest. Hopefully we can next year. But it's more complicated than I think most people realize - hence this essay and attempt at transparency.
@dwt802 as far as showing the Child Labor movie goes - if you came to our premiere last year in Bozeman, you'll know well that program was far too long. This year's program is over 90 minutes already. It's important to us that we have a program that balances short and long movies (and pow and street too) effectively. We have to make hard decisions, but it does help to hear your feedback and we are listening. FWIW, I'm not even sure if Child Labor would have wanted us to show their film on the whole tour.
If you want to see Child Labor on a big screen, make a trip down to SLC for their premiere that they will run themselves sometime in October! I can say for a fact it'd be well worth it, and you'd be supporting them directly by buying their tickets. It ain't that far.
Thank you to everyone who has expressed enthusiasm for the tour and/or bought tickets. We appreciate you!!!!!!
-Conor
