I’m not sure how I feel about this.  I tested by reloading the home page several times.  The Happening looks interesting, but I don’t that it looks that interesting.  I really enjoy the variation in the mastheads, more than once they’ve pointed me in the direction of a film I’d never thought of.  I guess if it helps the site stay in business I won’t complain too much.  Just sort of surprised.

same here, a site has to generate revenue somehow

A bit of an experiment, the Masthead thing is...Back to normal on June 13th.

Well, at least we made it bloody obvious, it is not like we’re insidiously “sneaking” more than the usual amount of mastheads in, hoping to secretly influence people.

However, for those people who think the masthead space was bought for advertisement purposes, that’s not exactly what happened.
It’s more like Todd is a stark raving Shyamalan fan, and this is him scratching that itch. 

I thought it was fairly smart and interesting.

I agree with Zombeaner, often the Masthead has pointed me at a film and it’s not uncommon for me to feel a sense of pride when a flick pops up there that I own on DVD.

The advertising via the masthead, it’s fine by me.
If it was for a long period, say, the film wasn’t due our for 2 months...It’d wear thin but the variety of screen caps and the short time actually made me more interested in the pic and now I’ll give it a look.

If it gets moola for Twitch, I’m for it.

Ardvark - June 4, 2008, 3:01pm

However, for those people who think the masthead space was bought for advertisement purposes, that’s not exactly what happened.
It’s more like Todd is a stark raving Shyamalan fan, and this is him scratching that itch. 

It’s both, actually.  We have people ask if they can use that space on a regular basis but will only consider it if it’s a film or film maker that we really like.  The Happening is the first time we’ve actually done it, but we’ve talked about it behind the scenes going well back.  Turns out, of course, that we put them up before they’d gone through the approval process at Fox so things are back to normal for the time being.

For those curious, though, as a general rule:

1.  These will only go up for films that we’re legitimately interested in and would be making mastheads for anyway.
2.  One film will only be allowed to hold that space for somewhere in the range of a week or ten days.
3.  I don’t think I’d ever allow the space to be held this way for more than half of any given month.  Not unless Guillermo Del Toro personally dropped a big bag of money and a fistful of exclusive Hellboy images off at my doorstep, anyway.  Then we could discuss it.

Gotta say, though, from a purely tech end I’m HUGELY impressed by how simple and elegant it was to do this.  Nice bit of coding there, Opus ...

Like I said, if it keeps the ship afloat, I’m all for it, as long as it doesn’t completely displace the cool rotating ones I’ve come to anticipate.  I was just a bit curious about the goal.  I think the short terms of this type of masthead is a good idea, since it would probably get a bit boring.

Seeing as how I’ve contributed some 400+ mastheads myself, I’ve grown a bit attached to the space in a strange way. I think it’s a good idea to use it as promotion for certain films/filmmakers that are in the good graces of Todd and the gang… afterall that’s kind of what they’re doing anyway. Might as well get payed for it! My only complaint would be that most of the mastheads for The Happening were rather boring—they need to provide some better stills for the film.

Seeing a bunch of Visualist’s mastheads arrive is always a treat. And I agree that most of “The Happening“‘s mastheads were not really selling the film or its concept.

Ah, the joys of only using Studio approved stills.  Sometimes the imagination isn’t there.

Ardvark - June 9, 2008, 3:59am

Seeing a bunch of Visualist’s mastheads arrive is always a treat. And I agree that most of “The Happening“‘s mastheads were not really selling the film or its concept.

There are a fresh batch in the thread you may have missed.