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Movies Losing Popularity at Box Office
andyring writes "Without the slightest mention of piracy, the MPAA said box-office revenues declined by 8 percent last year. About 40 percent of the decline came from the U.S. Now if only they'd realize that the decline is from movies sucking more than my shop vac." It's been a while since a film warranted spending the money to watch it in a room full of strangers.
[sarcasm] Ticket prices rising, movie quality decreasing = fewer ticket sales. Go figure [/sarcasm]
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I think two of the people speaking were trying to convince the audience to go see movies in theatres, "There is nothing like being part of the a community and watching a great film on the giant silver screen" or whatever. This made me a little sick. I rarely see movies in theatres these days because the other viewers are often inconsiderate (mainly by being loud and obnoxious), the tickets are expensive, and the theatres are often of poor quality (dirty, bad sound, poor projection, etc.). For the price of sending two people to the theatre, you can buy the freakin' DVD in a few months (I'm very thankfully for the quicker DVD release turn around these days).
FTFA: "We are exploring new ways to reach more people using innovative methods of communication and distribution."
I'm sure they are, but their big problem is that we already explored all that five years ago. Time to catch up, Hollywood, and fast!
And yes, I'll agree with the submitter's remarks - most movies nowadays are pure shite, little more than CGI thrown everywhere to try to cover a pathetic script. Oh, and don't forget the half-hour of commercials before the movie, too. And they always seem to start the commercials at the published start time. So you arrive half an hour late, trying to skip the commercials, and *this* movie was the one with only 15 minutes of crap in front of it.
I wait for the DVD nowadays. Cheaper, too.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
With the sale of home theaters on the rise I think that can also attribute to some of the loss. Many people I know who buy a home theater say they now have no reason to go the theater. I just got mine and I always ask why go out?
i agree
Come on, it's in the first sentence of the article. 40 percent of the 23 billion dollars in total sales was in the US, not 40 percent of the decline.
A misleading summary, here on slashdot, I'm as shocked as the rest of you...
According to the film critics Ebert and Roeper, it's their opinion that there was a bump in attendance over the last few years for movies like The Lord of Rings and Spider-Man/2 where fans would see the films mutiple times. Let's face it, there were some real block busters that came out in recent years like the LOTR trilogy, Spider-Man 2, Shrek 2, The Passion of the Christ, Finding Nemo, Stealth, The Dukes of Hazzard, etc. The Passion of the Christ alone made something $360 million dollars. The only real block busters this year seem to be Superman Returns and X3, so expect more tearful news from the movies studios around the same time next year.
There are just going to be some years were attendance exceeds normal growth due to the popularity of certain movies.
The reason for that is that they have choked off the supply of works going in to the public domain. Historically, Hollywood has dipped into the public domain for ideas. Nothing new into the public domain = nothing new in Hollywood.
Little wonder that Anime and Manga are getting more popular.
I work in film and the logic isn't flawed on paper. you take television from a previous generation and redo it with current generation talent.
you get the original audience and fans of the current talent. two birds with one stone. by and large that formula isn't broken. it works to the point that people go and see them, and they do rather well.
there is a dearth of original ideas. this is because more expensive films require compromise to mitigate risk. understand, most films, small or large, are financed by thrid parties. hollywood is notorious for not financing their own films. so these films are beholden to finance guys who want easily reducible commodities. remake plus star talent is a recognized formula.
the real problem here is this. hollywood primarily relies on the first-timers to make some cash. first timer are the rising young adult - adult generation. this is the problem - the first timeers aren't going to the movies. they're like the second generation to grow up with cable - so technically - they aren't first timers. So when a 30 something guy reflects that films are recycling themselves... hollywood is in the problem place that 18 year olds are saying the same thing. they've seen it all before.
this is why the movie paradigm is problematic. hollywood has always been cyclical before. They'd wade out the lull and wait for a rising generation and introduce them to old shit that's new to them. It's not new to them - they've probably seen the original on cable or online or via blockbuster. they have prior memory of originals and probably prefer them. so without the first timer cushion - hollywood is quite possibly rready for a paradigm shift.
un burrito me trampeó.
One other thing on the internet is instantaneous Communication with large audiences. Go to imdb and see a few comments and the film already rated and you just may change your mind about seeing it. Before the internet bad reviews got around on two legs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
One factor you didn't mention, but which is part of the Internet: reviews. Reviews (and leaked information prior to a release) spread further, faster, and can be more personal (I trust my friends to tell me what I might like more than reviewers on TV or in the paper). If a movie is bad it's more likely to be found out sooner than later now. For example, word of mouth is considered to have caused the Hulk movie to drop ticket sales by 70% in one week, which is one of the most dramatic drops ever.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Its just a forbidden love story: Princess and the Pauper, Romeo and Juliet, Lolita, Lady Chatterley's Lover, etc etc.
You just start with "Who isnt allowed to shag who in some parts of society" and take it from there. There have even been a couple of inter species ones, like Enemy Mine.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
Of course, I only go to see about one movie out of every few hundred these days because it is almost always obvious that most movies are going to be steaming piles of excrement.
No, the biggest problem with Hollywood is greed. Between then and the theater chains, the cost of a movie is absurd. $7.50 per person + $10 worth of refreshments comes out to a $25 date. Alternately, dinner at a fairly decent restaurant and BUYING a DVD of a two year old movie comes out to a $25 date. Which one is the better experience? Duh. I watched movies constantly when I could go to the early showing for $3.50. Now, it's over $5 and I've been to two movies in the last year, one of which was paid for by my employer. They priced themselves out of business.
And greed is the problem with their plot lines, too. The cost of making movies is insanely high---in part because of outrageous costs for actors and actresses, outrageous equipment costs, outrageous film/processing/splicing costs, etc., but in part because they just over-produce the movies---which leads to production of far fewer movies, and thus, it is almost impossible to get into Hollywood screen writing, and even if you do, it probably won't pay the bills.
The result, from what I can discern from the outside, is a relatively small talent pool that generally discourages new blood, which results in the same stale content being repeated over and over. Most (not all) of the wannabes who try to get into this pool tend not to be the best and brightest writers out there, as the best and brightest see that there's not a lot of hope of making money in the field, so they steer way clear and do something that will actually keep a roof over their heads.
The only real solution for Hollywood is this: use no-name actors and actresses more, pay your writers better, spend less time and money on special effects, produce more movies on a lower budget each, and search far and wide for new talent to increase the diversity of your writer culture. If you don't, you will eventually fade into obsolescence.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Actually they striped out a nationalistic PoV from the book, and replaced it with an anti-nationalistic PoV. Book:Power-Armorded supermen, highly-trained and expected to come back alive. Movie:Cannon fodder. It was very campy. But it's one of the best camp movies ever made.
I appreciate your background and the points you make, but is it really that simple?
... There's a zillion more in each category. Genuinely new ideas, or even interesting variants on old ideas, now only appear in very tiny numbers.
Over the past ~5 years, there's been a massive surge to release new versions of old movies - "The Pink Panther", "When a Stranger calls" - or movie versions of old TV shows - "Dukes of Hazzard", "Lost in Space",
In general, the originals being remade fall into two categories:
- really good movies, where there's no real chance that a remake will improve it (e.g. Pink Panther) and it's far more likely that a remake will be total crap
- really bad and/or cult movies/shows, where there's some chunk of a (predominantly) baby boomer audience that's virtually guaranteed to go along (e.g. Dukes of Hazzard, Mission Impossible). They rely almost solely on two comedy devices: (a) repeating the exact comedy lines that were most remembered in the original, (b) putting the "old" character/s in the present day (e.g. Brady Bunch), so the audience can laugh at their clothes, speech, etc.
What happened for things to get to this point? To some extent, I can understand remakes like "Dukes of Hazzard", because you've got a guaranteed audience, but why "Pink Panther"? It would have been obvious on day 1 that you can't hope to top the original scripts, and Steve Martin wasn't going to top Peter Sellers as Clouseau.
Are there any writers (as distinct from "re-interpreters") actually left, and if so, what are they doing? They can't all be doing stand-up; they don't all have their own TV shows; there's just not that many jobs as waiters in LA. Where are they?
Bring them back, put together plots that might actually push a 5yo mentality, line up and shoot the likes of Jessica Simpson and Hilary Duff for crimes against humanity, and you'll get your audience back again. It's really that simple. Baby boomers have all the cash, increasingly have time on their hands to spend it, but the movie industry (actually, make that the entire entertainment industry) seems to target only 13-30 year olds; wise up, there's not that many of them around, the average age of the population in the US is now 44 (and increasing by 1 year for every 2 years that pass at present), and 13-30 year olds don't have anything like the disposable loot that their parents have.
It's not like every movie has to cost $200m and have some hopeless bimbo in it to get an audience; Blair Witch and Michael Moore proved that convincingly. Sure it's probably not easy to make another Blair Witch, but the trail has been blazed for others to follow. Where are the movies being made for (say) $100k-$1m, which are amounts that could be raised without Hollywood-type "creative input" being imposed? I can see a few of them in arthouse cinemas, but why aren't they getting promoted more widely?
Hell, I'll make it even simpler. Here's how to get baby boomers back to the movies:
- stop thinking in terms of using stars and making huge profit, and make a movie with unknowns that will evoke some sort of emotion in the audience. Sorry, Vin Diesel, Tom Cruise et al; you had a good run...
- employ script writers who write scripts from scratch, rather than rehash old ones
- have more than 1 thread of plot going on; movies don't all have to be linear as some of us have attention spans greater than 30 seconds
- look at the age of the people around you, then forget targetting 15-30year olds as your prime demographic
- don't bother using bimbos to sell movies; boomers would rather watch a real actor than a clothes horse. If we want porn, we rent it. Bring back women who can act, and who aren't trying to look 30 years younger than they are
- stop making bad guys be really really bad, and good guys be really really good. Treat them as shades of grey rather than ridiculous stereotypes
- try making a film without CGI. It can be done, really
- as per the previous point, not every mov
This is a common sentiment, and there is a good reason why people say it. It's because time usually filters out the crap. Sure, there were really bad movies in the 60's, but are they remembered? No. We remember The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey but those were (arguably) some of the best movies of their time. But do people still talk about The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies anymore? No, because it sucked. It will be remembered even less when the people who were alive back then are dead. The same is true of music. We can wax nostalgic and say that classical music is the only good music, but I'm sure there was plenty of crap written back in Mozart's time. But it was bad, so people didn't write about it, perform it, or remember it. So now, it's mostly forgotten, even in the history books.
Look at it like this: Will you ever buy the movie Battlefield: Earth and show it to your kids? (Assuming you're not a Scientologist.) How about Howard the Duck or Batman and Robin? Unless you want to mess them up, I doubt it. In 50 years, they will only remember the good movies and people will say "Man, movies have really gone down the toilet these days." forgetting entirely about The Toxic Avenger.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
And by "agree with him totally" you really mean "get the gays and the blacks out of movies!"
Because you know, there were no movies made this year without gay cowboys or pimps.
Pixar didn't release anything to theaters in 2005. Of course revenue is down.
However, I don't go to the movies. Why should I? People are noisy, its either to loud or quiet, I can't smoke, I can't stop it, I can't go to the toilet, and, finally, my arse goes to sleep.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
- really good movies, where there's no real chance that a remake will improve it (e.g. Pink Panther) and it's far more likely that a remake will be total crap
I was thinking about this: remakes are common in all fields of performance, but nowhere is it as reviled as in movies. For example, we have recordings of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chichester Psalms; why should anyone else bother performing it? Because it's interesting to see how a different conductor and a different orchestra interpret the piece; because they can contribute something new to it. (And after all, the programs of most orchestras are almost entirely "remakes"; premieres are a small percentage of the output of most musical ensembles.) Same goes for theatre: why do we keep seeing new performances of Hamlet? Partly for the live performance aspect, but partly because 1) a number of actors want the chance to play the role themselves, and 2) audiences appreciate a different spin on an old favorite.
So why not do it in movies? Peter Jackson made "King Kong" because he thought, "I like that movie, I'd like to put my own spin on it." If someone really liked the Pink Panther and wanted to do the same thing, I have no problem with that. It could be interesting, if done well. Even if Steve Martin couldn't possibly "top" Peter Sellers, he could still be good, and do something interesting and unique.
The real problem is not that movies are remade, but that they aren't remade well. But a lot of movies aren't being made well, whether remake or not.
Just a thought.
It was a love story. Well actually it was a really well made love story. It had great cinemetography, great acting, and very good dialog.
The only reason more people didn't go see it was because it was GAY love story. People go to see crappy love stories like the endless stream of vomitous romantic comedies starring jennifer lopez or kate hudson. They won't go see a really well made love story like brokeback mountain though just because it's about gay people in love.
Having said that if it was about two hot lesbians in love the movie would have been a best seller. Mainstream america is disgusted by male homosexuality but LOOOOOOOVES female homosexuality.
evil is as evil does