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Hollywood Sets $10 Billion Box Office Record
kamikazearun sends in a TorrentFreak analysis that begins "Claims by the MPAA that illegal downloads are killing the industry and causing billions in losses are once again being shredded. In 2009, the leading Hollywood studios made more films and generated more revenue than ever before, and for the first time in history the domestic box office grosses will surpass $10 billion. ... [N]either the ever-increasing piracy rates nor the global recession could prevent Hollywood having its best year ever in 2009. With an estimated $10.6 billion in consumer spending at the US and Canadian box office, the movie industry will break the 2008 record by nearly a billion dollars."
Why is it that news stories about movie revenues never take inflation into account?
If the box office receipts were way DOWN, someone here would post, "Clearly, the Hollywood moguls are out of touch with what moviegoers are interest in seeing. Maybe they should stop taking two martini lunches and doing coke in the back of stretch limos with starlets, and stop hiring yesterday's stars like Tom Cruise for $20 million a flick. Hello? That, not downloading, is what ails Hollywood today".
And every post contributing in support of that conclusion would be modded up. Maybe we'll get that a year from now.
You forgot the next bits...
"Then by doubling ticket prices, changing a few laws and ripping our customers off repeatedly we can make that 30 billion."
People are still willing to pay to go to the movies for the superior screen/sound and crowd experience. Although the impact is far less than they claim, I would imagine pirated movies hurt dvd sales more than box office, at least in the US.
"We could have made 20 Billion if it weren't for all of those pirates!"
Don't worry, they'll simply sue ten thousand people for a million dollars each to get their money back. They may need a government bailout in the meantime. Nearly every single one of your elected officials have enjoyed soft money from the MPAA to ensure that everyone rolls over and sits when the MPAA instructs them to.
My work here is dung.
That's unlikely. They'll claim they spend more than ever to make movies and just barely make a profit. What they think is "We need new laws and ways to prevent consumers from watching the same movie twice without paying both times, watching movies on hardware not made by the same companies that own the movie studios or watching movies not made by the big studios."
From the article:
"The 2009 total was aided by a 28 cent increase in ticket prices from the year before to an average $7.46.
The total number of tickets sold, or admissions, is expected to reach 1.4 billion, up from 1.34 billion in 2008. Still, that figure is not expected to break the record 1.6 billion tickets sold in 2002, said Hollywood.com Box Office."
The reason for the higher revenue? Higher ticket prices. Ticket sales are down 12% since 2002. If you look at a long-term graph of ticket sales, you can see that it's been basically flat in the 2000s, compared to upper single-digit or double-digit growth nearly every year between 1970 and 2000. It's pretty much been stagnant since 2002.
Here's some numbers showing the trend:
2009 - Total Gross $9,782.4
2008 - Total Gross $9,630.6
2007 - Total Gross $9,663.7
2006 - Total Gross $9,209.5
2005 - Total Gross $8,840.5
2004 - Total Gross $9,380.5
2003 - Total Gross $9,239.7
2002 - Total Gross $9,155.0
2001 - Total Gross $8,412.5
2000 - Total Gross $7,661.0
1990 - Total Gross $5,021.8
1980 - Total Gross $2,749.0
http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/
1980->1990 = 83% Growth in 10 years, average of 8.2% per year
1990->2002 = 82% Growth in 12 years, average of 6.8% per year
Then, *mysteriously*, something happened around 2002:
2002->2009 = 9.2% Growth in 7 years, 1.3% per year (using the $10 billion number, not the $9,782.4 for 2009)
To put that in perspective, 1.3% is less than the growth of inflation.
In other news, the number of AIDS patients is higher than ever, and yet, the average lifespan continues to grow. I'm sure we all can see the correlation here: AIDS = longer lifespans. Torrent Freak spins reality even more than FOX news. I wish Slashdot wasn't such a fan of the pro-pirate spin.
Because to some of us movies are fun. Sorry if my idea of fun is lame. I could theorize that any attempt to replicate a theater experience at home is also "lame" but that would be rather presumptuous.
Although the impact is far less than they claim, I would imagine pirated movies hurt dvd sales more than box office, at least in the US.
Yes, and it should.
If I want to pirate a movie, I can go to a single site, find multiple options (1080p, 720p, ipod, ect) for just about every movie in existence. All of which are "in stock" and most of which I can download to my computer in less time it would take to drive to the store. The movie is presented to me without unskippable ads, without worry of scratching or losing, and can be archived without taking up space on my shelf.
All of this is free.
As most technical people are very aware, if I'm selling a product in a marketplace where a virtually identical product is available, I need to add value in order to get people to purchase through me instead of the competition. Adding value for movie studios is easy. They are selling legal copies and supporting the people who made the movies. The added value is already there. However, to add value, they need to provide an equivalent experience.
Currently, they aren't even close.
The television will not be revolutionized.
It sounds no worse than their "piracy takes money from the poor starving artists" while they use creative accounting to make more and more money and DRM & politicians to screw their customers more and more.
No, but it is justification to call the "problem" of copyright infringement insignificant.
It is also justification for the viewpoint that copyright as it stands now is more than adequate to ensure more production of works. Were it not, they would have produced LESS each year. Since that is the only Constitutional purpose of copyright, we need add no more protections.
According to Hollywood's accountants.
Growth in retail sales proves that shoplifting is beneficial for shop owners.
Also,growth in highway fatalities proves that seat belts are dangerous,
and growth in violent crime clearly fingers video games.
Seriously, slashdot, this is the weakest argument ever.
Soo... Sitting in a room full of people eating anonymous food, followed by sitting in another room full of people--this time with clear physical boundaries between you--trumps sitting in a room with just you two eating perhaps home-cooked food, followed by sitting in another room alone snuggling on a sofa, with an even more intimate room within 10 seconds' walking distance?
Sorry. You fail at dating.
So, wait, you and your potential mates are so insecure and immature that you constantly need to be giving and receiving physical contact and interaction? You haven't grown up enough or don't appreciate the other person enough to just be in their presence from time to time? In the words of Mia Wallace: "That's when you know you've found somebody special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably enjoy the silence."
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
When Stan Lee had to sue to get his cut of the proceeds from SpiderMan, I started to look at the MPAA's kvetching about pirates
with a jaundiced eye. If they want us to care about alleged copyright infringement, then don't try to fuck over the icons that made us
into fans and made them rich(er).
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
They could have afforded all three gold-plated Humvees filled with whores and coke, instead of only springing for two per person. Poor deprived movie execs...
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
By superior do you mean "volume's too loud" and "a quarter of the audience are self-centered assholes"?
That's an innovative definition you've got there.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"If I remember correctly, the amusing part of that is that the only ones that get paid royalties are the big-name groups, like the writer, director (I think), and actors. I don't think any of the construction workers, camera operators, or costume designers get anything other than a straight salary."
This confused a LOT of file sharing enthusiasts back when those ads were running. You're right, of course, that the trade and craft folks are paid on a salary, but the straw man here is assuming that the ads were trying to imply otherwise.
The logic employed by the MPAA is that piracy reduces sales, which in turn leads to cost cutting in the industry, which in turn leads to fewer films being made (ie. studios taking fewer chances on risky, smaller productions) or cutting costs by employing fewer people or moving productions to other countries.
That theory in itself invites enough debate without having to throw in the "the salaried employees have already been paid" straw man.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Also, people seem to always forget that the original purpose (however flawed) of copyright was ostensibly to protect the authors from .... the publishers, distributors and all sorts of assorted middle-men, since at that time those were the only people (and I use the term loosely) who had access to equipment capable of mass duplication of works of art.
Fast forward 200 years or so and you have the artists back in the dog-house and the assorted middle-men controlling everything. Which only encourages them to bray louder about being robbed by "copyright violators" while stiffing the artists at every opportunity ... a grand monument to the power of corruption of laws and societies by shameless, vicious, malignant greed.
Incidentally this behaviour, of preemptively and rabidly accusing everyone else in sight of the very crimes one is committing himself, is very common amongst various villains in all walks of villainy, such as career politics for example.
Here's a suggestion:
Scenario:
Movie studio office, 1930's style. Large expensive looking desk, semi-naked woman lying in it. Big fat movie executive wearing a 1930's style suit, holding a large lit cigar in his hand sitting on a chair behind the desk. Behind him, a window shows a sunny Californian day, with some palm-trees and an expensive sports car visible.
Around the office, other similar looking man are sitting in sofas surrounded by beautiful semi-claded women. Expensive looking sculptures and paintings are spread all over the office (possibly including one or two well known paintings).
Action:
Camera pans around the office, centers on the executive sitting in the chair with the desk (and woman) in front and the window behind.
Executive snorts a line of coke from the woman's belly, turns to the camera and says:
"I can't feed my family. Because thieves steal my work online."
> So, the success of the Music / Entertainment Industry is justification to pirate?
> We hate them and can rip them off because they are rich? Well, because that's what
> the whining here sounds like.
No. It's justification to ignore their drama queen antics and cries for further legal concessions.
Clearly the status quo is fine for them. They don't need any new laws. They don't even need
many of the recent changes to the law. They certainly don't require mass prosecutions, the
wholesale destruction of people's lives, or the the destruction of individual liberties,
consumer rights and consumer product protections.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> That theory in itself invites enough debate without having to throw in the "the salaried employees have already been paid" straw man.
It's not a straw man.
Past a certain point, YOU PERSONALLY are not going to benefit from any more sales of the product even if YOU PERSONALLY contributed to it's production.
Either way, it's probably not going to matter. A bad film is going to bomb and a good film is going to make profits for the studio that they studio will never admit to. Piracy won't change that. All Piracy does is inflate the sense of entitlement felt by the high level management at the studio. They mistake demand for the product at the ZERO price point as real value.
Piracy primarily skews the percieved value of the work.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I think that a lot of this "piracy" business that the MPAA and RIAA is a load of crap. For example, one of the loudest voices against Napster (before the became "legit") was Metallica. In one of the tape inserts for one of their albums (I forget which one), they claim outright that they used to trade tapes back and forth and copy them all the time before they made it big. So, it is OK when they commited piracy, but it isn't now when they are a target of it?
I'm glad their last album sucked....
Just the last album?