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Ebert: I'll Tell You Why Movie Revenue Is Dropping
schwit1 writes in with a link to Roger Ebert's webpage where he gives his opinion on the decline of movie industry revenues."According to Ebert movie piracy isn't the problem. He contends that the industry needs to lower prices on tickets and popcorn, keep people off their cell phones, show a wider variety of films, and understand that movie streaming is here to stay. From the article: 'The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It's the theaters that are losing their charm.
Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can't depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.'"
The Alamo Drafthouse had Patton Oswalt perform a "dramatic" reading of a message left at the theater by someone who was angry about having been thrown out for texting during a movie. It's pretty hilarious, and I first learned of the Drafthouse through their campaign of playing the original message as a sort of anti-texting PSA before screenings.
Oswalt's rendition: http://youtu.be/xnrlVjM715Y
I've wondered if theaters shouldn't go back to the old serials formula. With digital projectors, it can finally work again. It'd be a lot like TV, but more social.
Every afternoon would have a new episode, from a different series for each day of the week. Make it cheap. Parents could drop their kids off. Kids could socialize. Laser pointer jerk could get it out of his system. An entire system designed to attract the folks you hate. And away from you.
Evenings and weekends would revert to regular movie showings.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Movies have always been mostly dumb, mindless crap. Pick a movie from 30 years ago at random, and I'll bet you $100 it's terrible to mediocre.
There's a limited number of plot lines known, but given the number of Hollywood scriptwriters out there looking for new plot lines, it's hard to say that the problem is with the number of (good) plot lines possible.
However, I absolutely agree that the key problems are with regurgitated scripts, half-dead actors, a passion for not thinking, and a chronic paranoia towards originality.
Cinemas are partly to blame - there are occasionally good independent movies. Hell, there are occasionally documentary box-office hits (March of the Penguins out-sold The Fantastic Four first on limited release and then nationally in the multiplexes). The cinemas are quite capable of mixing in all kinds of stuff that might not appeal "to the masses" but which could certainly stuff one seating area full for more than enough showings to make a very healthy profit.
Also, box-office hits don't remain hits forever. A local cinema, back in the 70s, got Star Wars and retained it in month blocks until the audience numbers fell off. The last month it was retained, the cinema nearly went out of business. It was an expensive film to hold with near-zero audiences at that point. Modern cinemas have obviously far more screens and book in more rational blocks of time, but even so they must be wasting vast sums on holding onto too many copies for too long. Diversifying would not only increase the number of people actually going to the cinema, it would also reduce wastage from excessive rights.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually on paper most films never make a profit. The costs are structured so that various parental entities (production houses, etc.) charge huge fees so the actual film loses money but everybody who matters walks away with lots of cash. That's why smart and lucky actors always try to get a percentage of the gross, not the net. Many blockbuster films and TV shows have never made a profit, even after 30 years of syndication.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Funny enough I'm the IT guy for a small chain of arthouse theatres and there is no dropping of revenue going on there. Rather the other way round, this year was again better than the last.
And yes, tickets are rather cheap, concession (drinks, popcorn, etc.) too, there are about 30 different movies on monthly and hardly any of these are Hollywood movies. Still, people love that. They could buy the DVD instead, but they prefer to come into a friendly place, have a talk before and after the movie, drink a nice (and not too expensive) beer from a healthy selection, munch some very cheap and tasty popcorn and generally have a jolly good time. Many come at least once a week. Once you start to realize that there are literally thousands of great movies you've never heard of in the news there's a whole new world to explore. And once you realize that this is not just an "industry" you may even find some nice theatre you really like to go to.
I would totally agree that you can't rely only on blockbusters. Or on selling expensive beverages.
Hollywood is terrified to making movies with original ideas. Every movie is created by committee in order to appeal to the most demographics. Which translates into a plot that you've seen a million times before. The idea of making a movie that doesn't spend $50 million on special effects and another $50 milllion on big name actors, but instead invests in plot and acting is something only independents do.
I have been known to spend many hours in libraries reading such things as the congressional record from the 19th century, old trademark and patent gazettes, other very old periodicals and publications, and there are untold thousands of true stories that would make incredible films.
In the senate testimony during the period after the civil war and reconstruction, during hearings about the KKK, you could create several movies just from the eyewitness testimonies of southern people affected.
One particularly vivid example was testimony I came across where a community was terrorized - blacks and also whites who were viewed as sympathetic either to blacks or to the union.
The KKK rode through these places terrorizing the people while wearing blood-red hoods (white hoods came later I guess.)
Coincidentally some babies were stillborn with deformities that in the eyes of these frightened people looked reminiscent of these red hoods, and the whole community was thrown further into hysteria, referring to them as "ku klux babies" if I remember correctly.
Now tell me that it's not possible that some decent writer could read through the testimony of these hearings (which were the big national furor of the time) and come up with a very dramatic film? "Based on a true story" etc.
Wouldn't even have to pay royalties to some comic book company or whatever.
History and the present is filled with these stories everywhere you look, if you just look. And that's just the non-fiction.
It's even possible someone could imagine up some mystical humanoids in a fairy-tale like land that aren't even hobbits.
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Every movie is created by committee in order to appeal to the most demographics.
Nowadays that includes foreign audiences because roughly half of the revenue from big-budget movies comes from overseas. So they deliberately limit the scripts to what translates easily to any culture, and that leaves pretty much nothing other than famous faces, pretty girls and big explosions.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Ah, but you forget the context: to steal is to make your own. The full context from T.S. Eliot:
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
One room of my house has been converted into a mini-theater/game room. We have two projectors (the little one I though would be good enough... but wasn't and a much better one which cost me less than $1000 and is REALLY great). It allows us to play multi-player games together, but more importantly, we have a 120" movie screen with surround sound, two couches, bean bag chairs, a popcorn machine, a drink dispenser and a mini-fridge. And no... we're not fat :)
I built this room up when 3D movies came out. It's too damn hard to find a movie theater anymore where I don't have to wear a shitty pair of plastic glasses that give me head aches from the 3D or the unfamiliar pressure on my temples (sadly I lied about being fat... I have a really fat head... hopefully it means I have room for a bigger brain but more likely is a deformity). Last time I took the family to the theater, it cost me $18 a ticket (I'm in Norway), that's $72 just for tickets. Then two medium buckets of popcorn, 4 drinks and a pack of candy for each of us ran about another $50. That's $122 to go to the movies. Oh... and I had to pay for parking as well. That was another $20. So $142 for a movie. Sometimes we even had to pay for the cheap ass glasses... that adds up to another $20. So, now we're up to $162.
I can go online and purchase a film from iTunes, it costs $10-$20. If I rent, it's $2-$5. Popcorn costs us about $0.50 a bucket. Drinks cost $1 each. Candy costs $3 a pack (as we tend to purchase over priced, imported reeses peanut butter cups). Worst cast, $39, but more often closer to $29.
The movie room altogether cost probably about $2000 and since the kids and I spend probably 1/4 of our recreation time in there, it is paid off QUICKLY. Even if we did a movie night every other week, it still would have paid for itself in less than a year.
We stopped going to the theater for many reasons, but 3D (stupid glasses to see crappy picture quality) is the biggest one. Ticket prices was #2. Parking #3. Overpriced junk food #4.
OH!!!!! One more thing. Last time I went to the movies, they actually played 40 minutes of advertisements before starting the film. NO SHIT!!! 40 Minutes!!!! I clocked it. After gouging me for a fortune in tickets and junk food... they then forced me to watch 40 minutes of advertisements before seeing the 92 minute film!!! ARE YOU SERIOUS?!?!!?!? The kids were already out of drinks before the f-ing advertisements were over.
For a good laugh... I can buy round trip tickets to London for $100 a person (after taxes and transportation to and from the airport as well as parking), for a total of $400 between us. Then pay about $120 for a motel room for us. Even eating out every meal, we'd save about $10 per meal, or $60 in total. So, $460 for a weekend trip to London for the whole family. $162 times 3 is $486. So it actually costs me less to go to London with the whole family for a weekend than to go to three movies.