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Movie Industry Cries All the Way to the Bank
shandrew writes: "Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, has reported that the year 2001 was the "greatest box office year in film history" with movie admissions reaching their highest level since 1959. Isn't this the same industry that is complaining that piracy is putting them out of business?"
Gee, that's funny. I've noticed the opposite trend. Back in high school in the early 80's (cough!), the theatres here in Richmond, VA were huge. 'Ridge Cinema' had four or five enormous screens, with sense-surround or whatever it was called. (Remember Battlestar Galactica used it...).
Now, the Virginia Center Commons theatre is like a 20-plex, but with much smaller screens. Here's my theory: Say a real blockbuster comes out. You can show it on 5 of your 20 screens and still meet demand. You can even stagger the start times to limit the wait for the customer. As interest dwindles, you can reduce the number of screens in use (freeing them up for other flix), while still offering the movie in essentially full viewing rooms.
In the case of the old, large-screen model, as interest waned you'd be wasting all that space to continue to offer the movie, and would be unable to show anything else. I think it makes a heckuva lotta sense, actually.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You are forgetting foreign markets... Valenti (unless I completely missed it in the article) is only talking about US revenue... lots of non-top 20 films get carried overseas. Even if a film "only" makes 30M of it's 47M cost in the US how hard would it be to make another 17M world-wide? Not very hard really...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Monday, March 18th at 7pm, one of the Vice Presidents of the MPAA will be speaking at the main (I think?) branch of the Broward County Library with the public invited for a question/answer session.
Of course, if you listen to WLRN for any great length of time during the day, you know this
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
In case you havn't figured it out yet, people arn't payed based on how hard they work - they are payed based on how much money they make for their employers!
In case you haven't figured it out yet, employers pay people as little as they can get away with. What's more, they'll pay some classes of employees, women and blacks for example, less money than white males unless prevented by legislation.
Anyone who's ever worked in an IT department knows that productivity varies enormously between employees and salary only incidentally reflects productivity.
If you work in technology long enough, you'll figure it out eventually.
Remember, this is the same industry in which no film ever makes a profit, thus negating the need to pay royalties...
Yup, just ask the guys who wrote Forrest Gump (the novel, and the screenplay)
The movie industry is like Microsoft with concession stands.
~Philly
http://movies.go.com/boxoffice/index.html
Click "all-time leader" tab, Then "inflation adjusted list" on right.
Actually, number of tickets sold (i.e. number of butts in seats) does not hold across time (although it does so better than $$), for the simple reason that there are more people than there used to be.
A better metric is the percentage of people who saw a particular movie in each period, out of all the people who saw any movies in that period. Basically, you take a particular movie's number of tickets sold, and divide it by all tickets sold for a given time period. This gives you a metric that holds across time, because if (for example) The Matrix has a 20% share, and Episode I has a 15% share, and Gone With the Wind has a 50% share (the numbers are made up), then it doesn't matter how many people saw the movie -- of the available movie audience, half of them saw GWTW, but only 1/5 and ~1/7 of the audience saw the other two movies (each of which have grossed more than GWTW in real dollars).
Of course, no matter how you cut it, it's an inexact science -- GWTW has had 63 years for people to view it, and The Matrix has had 3. Plus, there's no exact count kept of who saw the movie more than once, whether 1 person seeing it twice counts as much as 2 people seeing it once, etc.
Ultimately, I wish people would stop obsessing over the financial/numerical popularity of movies and instead focus on how good (or bad) the movies are -- the artistic, social, or political impact of a movie instead of its box office. Every week, hundreds of publications (newspapers, magazines) have stories about how much business each movie did, but you never see a discussion of the movie from an artistic standpoint except for the initial review -- too rarely do publications come back later and have any kind of in-depth discussion of any film.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased