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

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

[Alien Being]

"they may not even release DVD's if they had to release them in a format that allowed for easy pirating"

The Circuit City DIVX fiasco proved that you're wrong. There was no chance that the studios would leave billions of dollars on the table just to spite the pirates.

Partly.

[jd]

On the other hand, studios have invested an enormous amount in advertising (according to most of the reports - I didn't know cheap plastic from sweat-shops in third-world countries cost that much, myself) and are largely complaining that they've seen next to zero return on investment. But, since studios ALWAYS say that (so as to avoid paying taxes, employees on profit-sharing scams, etc) it is often hard to tell fact (or what passes for it) from fiction.

Part of the reason they're 'fessing up is because movies like March of the Penguins were actually doing better than "blockbuster" titles like Fantastic Four. (Per screen, on release, March of the Penguins actually did make more money than Fantastic Four. It has now made more money than Fifth Element, in total, according to some articles.) It is hard to keep claiming that it's someone else's fault when even a French wildlife documentary can outsell multi-million dollar projects from Hollywood.

I think the other part of the reason is that the RIAA is starting to take a turn for the worse in the courts, and the MPAA wants a backup plan in case this spreads to their own lawsuits. In other words, if a movie does crap and fileswappers cases get kicked out, then they can now say "well, we TOLD you the script for that specific movie was no good!" It also didn't help the MPAA when eDonkey started talking about quitting. If there are no fileswapper companies to blame, it's going to get harder for them to push responsibility onto others.

(After all, they've known for HOW LONG that other people's movies were selling just fine? They were having a downturn for how many YEARS before fuel costs shot up? But it was only very recently that fileswapper cases stopped doing well, and only in the last week that eDonkey talked out quitting.)

Will this get Hollywood to make something worth watching? Uh, no. What it'll mean is that they'll spend even MORE on public relations to persuade people that the next movie is worth seeing. That's the usual corporate reaction - why change things, when you only have to convince people they're changed?

If anyone is really interested in the modern

[antifoidulus]

moviegoing experience, read Kevin Murphy's hilarious and insightful book, "A Year at the Movies"
He is a self-professed cinephile, but he seems to really hate the whole corporate moviegoing experience, but loves some of the interesting independent places he has found. Ones that actually offer a REASON(a good environment) for going to the cinema
Plus he smuggles a whole Thanksgiving dinner into a theatre!