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#ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES BRENDAN FREE#
We offer free admission for anyone under the age of 17, free admission to California residents with EBT cards. It’s been important for us also to think about how it is that we can reach people who can’t necessarily afford tickets to our museum. STEWART We have benchmarks that we’re trying to meet on a regular basis. I know what’s considered a successful box office opening for a film, but I’m not sure I know what’s considered a successful opening for a museum. We really want to lean into that because we have a gorgeous building. So our function as a rental space also exceeded our initial projections.

You have seen that there have been many premieres at the Academy Museum.

STEWART The Hayao Miyazaki exhibition far exceeded our expectations, and that wasn’t just in terms of attracting people into the gallery, but our retail product related to Miyazaki was a spectacular success.
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The flagship series that we launched, Oscar Sundays, and our Branch Selects have been doing very well with audiences. It’s been important to us that we do programs that start to build this sense of being a local resource for film lovers, for people who are film-curious. He is someone who attracts such attention in terms of the distinctive style of his work but also his social and political voice.
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I’d say the Spike Lee Gallery is always full when I’m walking through the museum. STEWART We opened with the blockbuster Hayao Miyazaki exhibition, and so folks who were clearly die-hard Miyazaki fans came from all over to see that exhibition. We’re hoping now, as COVID slowly eases up a little bit, that we get even more international visitors. In a COVID environment, we were a place to visit when people were a little bit hesitant to fly anywhere. So that statistic really means a lot to us.ĬONNELL Also, a lot of our visitors were from the greater Los Angeles area. We want to educate the next generations of film viewers as well. It’s part of our mission to try to inspire the next generation of filmmakers. If you look at comparable demographics from other museums, they skew older. STEWART We were really pleased to see that half of the visitors who came to us in this first year were under the age of 40. So it’s really a testament to the built-up excitement that people had for our opening. We were doing timed ticketing in the galleries and really trying to be mindful of numbers so that people could socially distance.

We were doing half capacity in our theaters through the spring. That’s bearing in mind that we were not selling tickets at full capacity part of the year. STEWART Seven hundred thousand tickets opening year - it’s just phenomenal. How did attendance compare to your expectations? We launched galleries, a cinematheque, a store, an event space, a publishing business. All of our energy was focused on opening this huge institution, and then it was like, “OK, and now we’re open seven days a week.”īRENDAN CONNELL JR. Then there’s that hold on their faces, like, “And now what do we do?” It was kind of like that. He disrupts the wedding, they get on the bus. We have a clip in the gallery of that closing moment in The Graduate. JACQUELINE STEWART I would say that we’ve been running a marathon at sprint pace. about the institution’s surprising visitor demographics, their response to the critique that the museum lacks Jewish representation and how their goal to lure the “film-curious” inside their doors is working out.ĭid this year feel like a marathon or a sprint? On the occasion of the museum’s one-year anniversary, THR spoke with Academy Museum director Jacqueline Stewart (who ascended to the position in July after serving as its head artistic and programming officer) and chief operating officer Brendan Connell Jr. John Waters Exhibition, Screenings of Agnès Varda and Fleischer Films, Coming to Academy Museum in Fall 15 and honors Julia Roberts, Steve McQueen, Miky Lee and Tilda Swinton. Since then, the museum has exceeded expectations by drawing 700,000 visitors (20 percent more than its goal), and it is easily covering its operating expenses via a mix of ticket sales, memberships (24,000 sold to date), a successful gift shop (which has done more than $6 million in sales), renting the space for events and its annual gala, which takes place Oct. After decades of false starts and years of delays for construction and the pandemic, the $484 million, Renzo Piano-designed Academy Museum finally opened to the public in September 2021.
