Can't hardly wait

From the newest gadget to the latest movie, everyone wants to be first

Elizabeth Correnti and four friends bought their tickets for "High School Musical 3: Senior Year" online more than a week before the film hit theaters, but they still showed up an hour early for the 7 p.m. screening on opening night. They joined a corps of makeshift Wildcats track suits, middle school students with Zac Efron's face emblazoned on their shirts and socks, and a few parents who were unable to wait another day to catch Troy and Gabriella's first foray onto the big screen.

"It feels like a midnight movie!" said Correnti, a freshman at Northeastern, while mothers wielding camera phones snapped shots of their toddlers posing next to cardboard cutouts of characters Sharpay and Chad. "There's an energy and excitement on opening night that fades after a while," Correnti said.

She wasn't alone in her logic. Opening on more than 3,500 screens, "High School Musical 3" saw first-day returns of more than $16 million. Tickets were available for purchase online a month before the Oct. 24 premiere, yet hundreds lined up outside the theater anyway.

The movie step-kicked off this season's schedule of line-worthy events. November brings the film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" and Guns N' Roses' first CD in 17 years, which will soon be followed by "The Dark Knight" DVD release in December and J.K. Rowling's first book since Harry Potter - all sure-fire hits ready to convert stores, movie theaters, and bookstores into temporary housing for devoted fans willing to wait, often until the clock strikes 12:01 a.m. for the first ticket or copy.

But these waits aren't exactly for a private reception with the pope - these are movies that will stay on 3,000 screens for months and books that will keep display shelves stacked for weeks. So why line up? Because it's a chance to congregate with a franchise family, and a chance to earn the badge of honor that comes with an hourslong wait. But it's also a marketing tool engineered to produce an opening-day explosion. Everyone wins: Fans get the first glimpse, and producers get a colossal opening weekend. The line has been so successfully retooled by marketers and fans alike that the unnecessary wait has suddenly become an event in itself. These lines are something markedly different from the usual toiling in the bank lobby at lunchtime. When did the queue go cool?

Some serial queuers see the line as an essential part of any anticipated event. A couple of hours on opening day is no big deal when anticipation has been building for months.

"You're talking to someone who was the first, second, or third person in line for all three 'Lord of the Rings' movies," said Sabrina Karpe, a "discerning, slightly obsessive fan" who lives in Brookline Village and works as an assistant store manager at Barnes & Noble. Waiting to see the final installment of the "Rings" movies, Karpe left the line to watch an episode of "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer" in a stranger's New York City apartment. It was cool - they had met in line.

This spontaneous connection is tied to a longing for makeshift communities, says Dr. Richard Larson, a civil engineering professor at MIT who has earned the nickname "Dr. Q" for his work studying queues. The crowds that form outside theaters and bookstores on the eve of a release are "not a queueing but a happening," he said, a way to proclaim: "Hey, I'm part of this club."

"They're the spontaneous creation of like-minded people who were strangers but became soulmates," Larson said. This self-identification is driven for social reasons, he said, but the curiosity generated by long lines can persuade others to join. "The longer the queue, the more likely you can be to join it," Larson said, because, after all, 500 people dressed as The Joker can't be wrong.

Nor, as some marketers hoped, can 500 commissioned fans. The day before the iPhone went on sale in Poland, the country's largest mobile operator paid hip-looking film extras to stand in lines outside stores across the country to build interest.

Increasing popularity for sites like Fandango.com and iTunes, where fans can secure tickets or tunes without leaving the house, has reduced the need for the line. Yet "everybody wants what they can't have," said Benedict Coulter, president of Trailer Park Inc., a Hollywood marketing firm. And not everyone can have the front-row seat or next-day bragging rights - privileges rewarded only to the line toiler.

Lightning-speed online piracy and a hope to make the evening news coverage have led firms like Coulter's to heighten opening-day anticipation. A 12:01 a.m. Friday screening - so common even the self-serious mob flick "RocknRolla" got one - can capitalize on the buzz before yesterday's release goes stale. "In our industry, the hot/cool thing happens week after week," Coulter said.

And week after week after week, according to Harry Knowles, the self-proclaimed "HeadGeek" at Ain't It Cool News, an online movie gossip site. Now "a film can own a weekend, not a year," Knowles said. He remembers the original "Star Wars" film hitting theaters in 1977 and staying on screens for more than a year - an astronomical length of time by today's standards.

Knowles sees queue communities organizing online. "The line communities are formed online with different social networks like MySpace and Facebook. People organize in advance, become friends online, and then go to the events together," he said. Knowles also agreed that studios push for midnight screenings to increase the number of tickets sold before a movie is pirated and ends up available online for free.

On the other side of the line, at her bookstore job, Karpe contributes to the opening-night theatrics that can make time stop for the queued fanatics. Publishing industry edicts forbid the book boxes' tape to be broken before 12:01 a.m. when a major release - like Rowling's "The Tales of Beedle the Bard," out Dec. 4 - hits stores. Parents line up beside cash registers with cameras, taking photos as the box tape breaks and the mass-produced copy is sold, Karpe said. It's like a dance recital with receipts.

Karpe calls these kind of openings "event releases," where the wait can be as meaningful as the eventual purchase. Dr. Larson finds these voluntary lines all the more phenomenal, because in most other circumstances a line is avoided at all costs. Grocery stores offer self-service check-out aisles, and automated machines have substituted the human operator. These changes adapted "partly due to the dread of lines, but also because it's a reduction of labor," Larson said.

So the compulsion to queue up for a movie or book relies on the product's preexisting fan base, Knowles said. Studios can tease fans with scene sequences at Comic-Con, the comic book convention, and the Internet boards are already buzzing with rumors on James Cameron's "Avatar," which isn't scheduled to hit theaters until December 2009.

Anticipation like this is what drives the devoted like Karpe to join the queue and its "immediate sense of commonality," she said.

"You're never going to see them again, but you have that hourlong friendship," Karpe said of her brothers-in-arms. Or if the marketing goes as planned: a six-hour friendship, followed by a reunion when the sequel hits.