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Box Office 2014: Moviegoing Hits Two-Decade Low
mrspoonsi writes The number of people going to the movies in 2014 in North America slipped to its lowest level in two decades. According to preliminary estimates, roughly 1.26 billion consumers purchased cinema tickets between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31. That's the lowest number since 1.21 billion in 1995. Year-over-year, attendance looks to be off 6 percent from 2013, when admissions clocked in at 1.34 billion. Admissions have fluctuated dramatically over the years, and particularly since the advent of modern-day 3D, which can skew the average ticket price. Movie going in North America hit an all-time high in 2002, when 1.57 billion consumers lined up, thanks in part to Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
I don't go out to movies because of noise.
I'm sick of hearing people yelling at the TV, parents who won't take the screaming kid out, etc. No thanks, I'll watch it at home on my 60 inch TV with 7.1 sound.
These last few of years I was signed up for Lovefilm (DVD Delivery) and then Netflix. After a while the convenience was beat by the limited offering and the annoyance of Netflix UK trying quite hard to hide away what's available and what films will be on in the future. Last month, for the first time in years I watched 3 movies at the cinema and this year I'll sign up for a Cineworld £16/month subscription. There's a couple of months in 2015 that won't have very appealing releases but from the list I saw so far, there will be 2 worthwhile films every month, plus those that I will watch now and wouldn't if I had to pay extra. Yes, there will be road traffic to get there and noise from others eating popcorn but I'll be watching current films.
Once you've bought into the idea of watching recordings, it doesn't matter so much whether you watch them on an enormous screen in a theater or on a computer screen at home. Price and convenience then favor the computer screen.
If you want to put the "human" back in humanities, try live theater. I never used to like live theater because the only options I thought I had were productions in high schools (which are sometimes pretty good but often not as good as films) and fancy travelling productions with hundred-dollar tickets in intimidatingly fancy theaters (which are good, but hardly as casual as a movie). Then I discovered the Shakespeare Tavern in Midtown Atlanta, which is a professional group that has cheap ($20!) tickets on Thursdays. Atlanta isn't an especially cultured city overall; if we have something like this, I suspect most other cities will, too.
I've seen six distinct plays at the local theater (and rewatched all of them at least once) and films in movie theaters are no longer the same. Sure, I enjoyed Interstellar---that movie's attitude towards science would go over well on Slashdot---but it tends to use dramatic [manipulative!] music to make you care about the characters. But when you're watching a live production, you care about the characters because they're people---live people. not a hundred feet away! The exchange works both ways; the actors are more animated because they're presenting to a live audience instead of a camera. I tried watching three film versions of Twelfth Night after repeatedly watching it live; none of the film versions even came close to the live one. (Of minor note is that the theater in *my* town doesn't alter or remove anything from the original Shakespeare scripts; your town's troupe may do things differently.)
This post isn't meant as an endorsement of Shakespeare in particular so much as live theater in general. Don't assume that live theater is either too expensive or poorly-done; in Atlanta, at least, you can watch professional actors for the price of two movie tickets. I would encourage everyone to take a look at what their cities have to offer.
The last time I went to see a movie, I spent considerably more for my regular movie ticket, a popcorn, and a coke than I did for a 5th-row seat on Metallica's "And Justice For All" tour 25 years ago. There is something very wrong with that (aside from the fact that Metallica has since went to shit).
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
IMHO, ticket sales are tanking due to the cost of tickets and the movie going experience. I'd pretty much stopped going to see movies in the theater because I was sick of paying a lot of money for a terrible experience at my local Regal. Starting with the supposed show time, you'd get about 15-20 minutes of commercials, the MPAA PSA that accuses you of being a thief, a couple of trailers, and finally, a half hour after it was supposed to start, the movie. Then, during the movie, half the audience would be jabbering away, cell phones going off all the time, and even people shining laser pointers at the screen. And the theater wouldn't do anything to try to stop it.
Now that I have an Alamo, I'm starting to go to movies again because it's completely different. Tickets for regular showings are cheaper than the matinee showings were at Regal and the experience is FAR better. Add to that good food and drink, and it's wins all around.
End of line..
Lol
It still fits, especially when you consider that, instead of putting the blame where it rightly belongs (mostly folks watching movies at home via PPV/Netflix/iTMS/etc), you just know the fsckers are going to shout the "P" word and demand that BitTorrent be made illegal or somesuch.
Personally, I think it has to do with a lot of factors, even outside of the Netflix effect; chief among them is that most movies sucked pretty hard this year, with very few good ones coming out. The same old formulaic bullshit just isn't going to pull in the ducats, you know?
To top that off, I noticed something else: There are some damned good (and compelling) shows coming out of television these days. It used to be that TV had crappy SFX and production values, while the movies had the best-of-breed in SFX, acting, production, etc. Nowadays, you can rarely tell the difference in many cases - when you have masterful series coming out of the networks which have nearly the same cinematic and production quality of the studios, then why bother with whatever the studios have to offer? There's still the adverts in most cases (outside of HBO/Cinemax/etc), but there are a zillion technologies which can neatly get around that, so...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
My biggest gripe with movie theatres is that every movie is priced exactly the same. So I want to got see a romantic comedy which cost almost nothing to make, it costs the same price as going to see the must see blockbuster of the year that took tens of millions of dollar and years of effort to put together. In my mind they should make the movies that require less effort and investment cheaper to see at the theatre. I also think they should reduce the price after it's been out for a while. Charge $20 on opening night for big blockbusters because they know they are going to fill the seats either way, and then as the weeks go on and crowds dwindle, bring the price gradually down to $5 or so to keep the seats full. For $5 there's probably a decent amount of people that would go see it a second time, but not if they had to pay full price.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In fact Alamo a few years back threw out a seemingly drunk individual for texting and turned it into a pre-movie PSA.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yes and no. Hollywood wants same day DVD release, the only thing preventing that is Walmart. As efficient as their distribution system is, it still takes 45 days to get a product onto store shelves. Hollywood doesn't want to risk that leak window.
> The same old formulaic bullshit just isn't going to pull in the ducats, you know?
It is going to get worse. Hollywood makes more money from overseas sales than they do domestic sales. The problem with that is sophisticated concepts are very hard to translate into another languages, especially the ones that depend on cultural literacy in the original cultural. So Hollywood has, by and large, taken the easy way out - they've dumbed it down. The result is that the money goes into stupid movies that are stories built around "boobs and bombs" -- e.g. practically everything that Michael Bay has ever made -- because that language is universal.
These box-office results won't be enough to make Hollywood realize the error of their ways. They are so fucking risk-averse that instead of changing, they will double down. They will see these numbers as proof that they need to make their movies even more translation-friendly so as to chase even more foreign sales and the result will be even stupider scripts. It is a feedback loop.
The best we can hope for is that eventually they start making entirely foreign productions - a movie made in Mandarin can be dubbed in Cantonese and have a potential audience of nearly a billion without having to be dumbed down.
I loved going to theaters back when tickets were the cost of a loaf of bread. I had one growing up.
Back in Fargo, ND in the mid-to-late 1990's, there was a business owner who built the Fargo Cinema Grill. Tickets were $1.50. You went in, sat down, ordered food before movie started (or after if you arrived late), got it about 15-30 minutes into the show, and enjoyed a great meal with your movie. They served all your standard bar & grill food...pizza, burgers, fries, wings, popcorn...plus tall sodas and beer. There was plenty of space to eat, sit and relax. The community loved it, and, for a while, it was a viable business. Unfortunately, the local commercial theaters in town that were owned by CEC Theaters had some kind of monopoly rights on movie showings with the big studios and wouldn't let the CG show a film until after CEC dropped it in their theaters. CG couldn't get enough customers to watch movies in their theater when the movies were already out on DVD. They closed up shop in '99.
While they were open, we always had a reason to want to go to the theater. It was a restaurant and theater in one. In fact, when you think of it as a restaurant instead of a theater, people go out to eat all the time, so why not enjoy a movie while you eat? I wish the idea caught would have caught on with CEC, but they said once in a newspaper article, "That's just not our business model."
I watched Seven Brides For Seven Brothers recently. What a wonderful film; the technicolor cinematography so warm, the dancing sequences, particularly the fight at the barnraising, just absolutely astonishing. No CGI needed there, just lots of rehearsal and some stunning choreography.
Is it just me or did some of those Technicolor musicals just some of the most beautiful films ever made? Even if you don't like the songs and dancing, just the look of the films is extraordinary.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.