Bad Movies to Blame for Box Office Slump

macklin01 writes "The LA Times is reporting that box office executives are finally fessing up and taking the blame. Poor box office receipts over the summer weren't caused by surging fuel costs, changes in audience preferences, or anything else. As Slashdot readers might have put it (and as it comes out in the article), 'It's the movies, stupid.'"

Comments

The "bad movies" fallacy

[NetDanzr]

Just a few weeks ago I was doing some research on the media, when I decided to run a statistical analysis on movies. The only conclusive thing I found was that bad movies are not to blame for lower box office tickets. Why? Because the movies were better than last year. Consider the following:

The critics rated all researched 2005 movies (those that were still in theaters by the end of August - slightly over 100) with 69%. For 2004 movies, it was 64.25%. The audience also posted better ratings for 2005 movies: 68.4% versus 67.9% (source: IMDB). In the case of blockbusters (defined as movies opening on more than 1000 screens), 2005 movies come up on top as well: 62% versus 59.5% by the critics and 63.1% versus 61.7% by the audience. Independent movies were an exception: while critics rated them higher in 2005 (76.25% vs. 71.5%), the audience rated them lower: 70.9% vs. 71.5%.

Despite these numbers, the opening weekend has seen a drop of 12.87%. For blockbusters this drop has been even more significant, despite the fact that they were rated higher and that they opened on 5.14% more screens. The drop in box office was 15.79%, compared to last year. Yet, the top 8 movies had an above-average per-screen revenue on the opening weekend, and the top 6 movies retained this statistic into the fourth week. In addition, the reviews have a positive correlation to the movie revenues (42.9%).

As a result, I don't believe that bad movies are to blame for the box office to slump. I can speculate (haven't run any statistical analysis for those), that the declining revenues are to blame on a set of other factors, such as rising ticket prices, rising gas prices, shorter time to DVD, commercials before movies, and others.

Re:it's their mess, hope they clean it up

[Dun Malg]

Good point about the technological use restrictions, but they may not even release DVD's if they had to release them in a format that allowed for easy pirating. So it's not all bad.

+1 Insightful? More like -1 Ridiculous! They're in the freakin movie business. The way they make money is by selling movies. They wouldn't release DVDs if pirating were easy? Like they did with VHS? Yeah, not a single movie was released on VHS. Furthermore, it's not like region coding does diddley squat to prevent piracy. It's not even intended to stop piracy. It's sole purpose is to facilitate market segmentation, whereby the movie industry can squeeze the maximum possible profit out of every market in the world without the low income regions undercutting the high income ones by selling out of the country.

Re:it's their mess, hope they clean it up

[dgatwood]

Reread that. The GP poster said region coding didn't do anything to prevent piracy, not that it didn't do anything. And that's correct. It does nothing against piracy.

I can guarantee the movie industry would have released material on DVD even without those protections. Why? Because for every videotape produced, it costs a significant chunk of change and takes a significant amount of time in some giant room full of VCRs recording the content, probably at real-time speed. A DVD can be stamped in a fraction of a second, and costs a tiny fraction of what a videotape costs from a manufacturing perspective. THAT is why the movie industry was inevitably going to move to a digital optical disk format, protection or no protection, just like the audio industry did.

It's simple math, really:

Videotape: Retail price: $15
Channel loss: $5.
Movie company gets $10.
Tape costs $3 to dub.
Profit: $7. DVD: Retail price: $20 (better quality, so let's charge more).
Channel loss: $6.66.
Movie company gest $13.34.
Costs $0.20 to manufacture.
Profit: $13.14.

The very suggestion that the movie industry would continue to encourage people to buy videotapes at such low margins knowing that DVDs would generate nearly double that margin is utterly naive. Protection or no protection, there was never any question about whether studios would relent.

The problem is that two of the companies making up the DVD standard WERE content companies, and thus, copy protection was also inevitable....

Re:it's their mess, hope they clean it up

[Allnighterking]

Yes I am. Most of the people who want to share this stuff can't correctly operate their spy-ware magnet..... but they can push the "duplicate" button on their DVD player/recorder. Directions on the one I have a real hard.

1. Do you want to duplicate a DVD? [yes] [no]

2. Insert the original DVD in the Tray, close the tray and push the go button (along with a picture of the go button)

Archiving {here the screen get's hash marks that slashdot won't display}

3. Remove the original DVD from the try and insert a blank DVD disk in the tray, then press go (again with the picture.)

Recording {here the screen get's hash marks that slashdot won't display}

4. Do you want to make another copy of this DVD?

BTW my home DVD player/Recorder will do 8GB and 12GB DVD's... but my comp is limited to 4GB.