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?"

Comments

Re:Same for the music industry..

[Dirtside]

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.