Anne Thompson finally gets it.

I'm not saying it hasn't occurred to her before, as she has mentioned the theories behind the pathos behind "Paranormal Activity" and its marketing campaign, but she dove into it a bit more than any of her Mainstream Hollywood Peers have in the past year.

From her Blog:

Paranormal Activity‘s $20.2 million gross ($26,530 per screen) on 760 screens marks a sea-change, a new way of looking at the $35 million that studios tend to spend on a wide opening. With the coming reduction of pictures in the marketplace—The Film Department’s Gill predicts that less than 400 will be released in 2010—perhaps it’s time to reexamine the marketing and distribution rules and regs that have developed over the years. Are they all necessary? Wide openings are not the only way to go. Paranormal is at $33.7 million after a month, with less than $10 million in advertising.

Those who say Paranormal Activity could have had a number one opening are missing the point. This is not the old paradigm: take the number one slot at any cost by blasting ads at a mass audience. It’s a new approach: build buzz and anticipation slowly, and foment a sense of low supply and high demand so that audiences are clamoring for the picture. Oren Peli’s cheap vid-thriller goes from 760 screens this weekend to 1800 next. And yes, Paramount couldn’t just snap their fingers and score 1000 screens. Next weekend, they will double the screen count.

Now Paramount’s marketing people are offering parties at the first ten local cinemas that sell out on the midnight show on Thursday night/Friday morning October 23. (AICN’s Harry Knowles announced this, so naturally his local theater, The Alamo Drafthouse, was the first to sell out.)

The point is, you don’t have to pay for a wide release—as long as you have a good movie. And it doesn’t have to be a cheap genre film. It just has to be something that audiences can get enthusiastic about. They could have done Whip It (which Searchlight previewed) or Zombieland or District 9 this way. Yes the studios spent plenty on advertising those movies. But what if the studio didn’t have to spend as much as they thought?

With fewer movies in theaters and less clutter, maybe there’s more room for playing around in the margins. The reason the studios have built up these huge spends is fear, basically—-make a lot of noise and take no chances. The actual number of theaters that are necessary for proper returns on movie is really more like 800. Seriously.