Prints and Advertising (P&A)

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Baking a cake is one job. Printing flyers, buying an ad in the school newsletter, and physically carrying the cake over to the bake sale table is a completely different job, with its own separate cost. Even a perfect cake will not sell itself if nobody knows the bake sale is happening.

Prints and advertising, almost always shortened to P&A, is exactly that second cost for a movie. It used to mean literally two things: paying to print physical copies of the film reels, called prints, to ship out to theaters, and paying for advertising to convince people to actually go see it. Today, movies are almost always delivered digitally instead of on physical film, so the term has shifted to mean mostly the advertising and publicity side, the marketing spend needed to get people into their seats.

Why it is counted separately

P&A is one of the biggest Costs involved in getting a movie in front of an audience, but it is separate from the cost of actually making the film. A studio can spend just as much, or even more, marketing a movie as it spent producing it. This spending happens on top of everything else, before the movie ever earns back a single dollar of Box Office Receipts.

Fun facts

• A movie's marketing trailers, posters, and billboards are all part of its P&A spending.
• Because P&A is so expensive, distributors sometimes pass on a movie they otherwise like, simply because they are not confident they can afford to market it properly.
• The "prints" half of the term has mostly disappeared in practice now that most theaters show movies digitally instead of from physical film reels.