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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?
There was an article a while back (no I can't find it with the 2 minutes of searching I did) where a magazine compared the ticket sales of economic recessions during the 90's and early 2000's. The summation of the article was that even with major blockbuster films, like Starwars ep 1, Hollywood made less money than the year before because times were good and people were doing things besides going to the movies, but in economic downturns they actually made more money. The theory was that audiences will attend movies to distract them from all the problems that they have instead of stewing in them.
I'll post it if I can find it but the laziness is running deep tonight.
Back in college I saw an ad before a movie where a stunt double, key grip and other low paid stagehands were filmed in front of their families, eating and doing things with them. Then they would look up and say something to effect of, "I can't feed my family. Because thieves steal my work online."
... because even though my employer posts record revenues, the justice system makes you are a perfectly legitimate scapegoat."
Someone should make an anti-anti-piracy ad with the same exact thing except when they look up they say, "I can't feed my family
Odds that the profits from this revenue make it back to the people who genuinely need it to keep the system healthy? Slim to none. Executive producer gets more executive while life risking stunt double gets poorer.
My work here is dung.
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."
To me, it is remarkable that for an industry that has been around for more than a century, is this large, and has become so integral to the lives of North Americans, that somehow, a growth rate of over 11% is achievable.
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.
We did go see Twilight god help me got being so whipped.
No wonder you're an Anonymous Coward. Dating 13 year old girls...tsk tsk...
Wikipedia has a nice explanation of Hollywood Accounting.
I don't like the movie studios much but the article is highly misleading, it only mentions total revenue and if you dig into the articles the article itself references it clearly shows a declining profit per movie and less movies being made which kinda supports the studios positions. Personally though I think the declining profit is because most movies made nowadays are utter shit.
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.