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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.
less than $30 i can buy a blu ray with a digital copy redeemable on itunes or ultraviolet
vs
$30 to see a movie once in a crowded theater and with crappy 3D unless i'm lucky enough to get a middle seat and then it's a big PITA to go to the bathroom after drinking a gallon of coke in the first hour
When you keep releasing a slew of poorly written movies, yet continue to demand unreasonable fees, this is the result. People aren't willing to shell out the bucks to see a B grade movie. It's just not worth it anymore.
I'm not some movie-snob either. Most of the movies released have no replay-ability or just left a bad taste in ones mouth (Ender's Game).
So movie attendance was at its peak at the height of easy money and is in a local 20-year valley at the bottom of a 60-year workforce participation chart.
Therefore, it must be the Pirate Bay's fault. Q.E.D.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
No, it can't be. It can't be that going to the movies has become some endeavor you have to financially plan before setting out on it (with parking, food and all you'd be lucky to get out below 20 bucks per person). Let alone that people have less money in a depression as well and movies is one of the FIRST things to cut back at (seriously, if your choice is to eat tomorrow or to see a movie tonight...). It can't be that we don't want to "enjoy" our movie in the presence of people who grew up in a barn. It can't be that we get headaches from the "invisible" flickering and whatnot introduced to keep us from using our cellphones to record the movie. It can't be that the script of the average movie fits on a legal page and the renarration of the content fits easily on a post-it.
It must be due to sharing platforms. Yeah, that's why.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I stopped going to the cinema because of people talking to their mates (usually in any language but English) either because they were bored or couldn't understand what was going on. The second reason was people checking Facebook or something on their phone and causing a distraction.
That said, some movies simply don't work as well on the small screen. I watched Guardians Of The Galaxy a couple of days ago and wished I'd watched it in the cinema instead. The climatic battle at the end didn't feel as epic as it should have.
Provided it gets good reviews, I'll watch the new Star Wars film in the cinema, but as for everything else, I'll rent it off whatever streaming service hosts it.
Summation 2
In the various documentaries I have seen regarding the First Great Depression, the movies were regarded as an inexpensive form of entertainment. Admission for a nickel ($.05). Granted, those were the days before television, so if you wanted to watch something, you had to go to the theaters. During the Second Great Depression, folks can stay at home to get a similar level of entertainment.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
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.
A loaf of bread cost 5-10 cents during the depression, so 5 cents for a movie ticket was inexpensive. If movie tickets still cost the same as a loaf of bread today, theater attendance rates would be much better.
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.
1. A lot of the movies that are showing are crap (and that is being kind).
2. The cost of my going to a movie and wife along with some munchies, well, I can buy the DVD in a few months for less money.
3. We can pause the movie at any time and take a break or grab some munchies (and not the over-priced crap in the theatre).
4. Did I mention most of the movies are crap?
5. We can skip the various 'ads' at the start of the movie. I want to see the movie, not pay to see advertising.
6. I don't have to put up with people talking about the 'good stuff' coming up and spoiling it for me.
7. I don't have to put up with the cell phones going off.
8. Did I mention most of the movies are crap?
We have very comfortable chairs at home and there is no line up to get food, drinks or when we go to the bathroom.
I wait a few months until the DVDs or Blue Ray versions come out. I then wait until friends and family give their feedback and then I may buy a copy, but, I usually wait a few more months and the video store discounts the movie. I have hundreds of videos, but, over 95% I have not paid more than $10 for. There are exceptions, but, they are for movies in a series that I (or my wife) love and want to see the next one quickly.
Again, did I mention most of the movies are crap?
Panic now, beat the rush!
To build off of that, from what I have read, the 2 main factors are:
1. Quality of the movies – or lack there off. If there are 10 quality movies in a year, people will go out and see 10 movies. If there are 2 quality movies, people will go out and see 2. Entertainment dollars are flexible.
2. Improved quality of home theaters, Video On Demand, and TV / cable shows. Why spend $10 to watch a romcom on the big screen when you can spend less to watch it at home. Some films demand to be seen on the big screen. Others not so much. Plus some long format TV shows are doing things that film can't do. Game of Thrones is a popular example.
For myself, I go to 2 or 3 full price films each year – and only because I think the film benefits from seeing it in IMAX, 3D, so something along those lines. I will see another 5 to 10 films at the local cheap seats theater, where my wife and I can see a movie and have pop and popcorn for under $10. And that is more of an excuse to get out of the house rather than anything else. Everything else is on the home theater.
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..
Hollywood doesn't seem to be able to come up with new stuffs
I keep hearing it over and over again, but it's just not true - It's that people don't want to go watch 'new stuffs.'
Go to http://www.rottentomatoes.com/ and look at new movies movies & new DVDs that were 'certified fresh' for 2014. Tons and tons of new stuff, all rated as good.
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?
What, you mean you don't want to see "Iron Man vs. Ant Man vs. The Fantastic Four While Spiderman Wacks Off In a Corner 2: Rise of the Who-Gives-A-Fuck"?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
Actually, $0.05 in 1930 would be $0.70 today.
Even calculating from 1985 when prices were around $4/ticket inflation should have only brought them to $8.78 - the last movie ticket I bought was $19.99 to watch the Hobbit on New Years (horribly disappointing). Funny thing about it though - the audience was smaller than the $6 tickets to see It's a Wonderful Life which was nearly sold out.
My wife and I stopped going to the cinemas a year or so ago because every movie we wanted to see, there was no option within a 45 minute drive to see these movies in anything but 3D.
I'm not sure what it is and maybe it's not the same everywhere else, but on both our Cineplex Odeon and Landmark Cinemas screens at three theatres, the action on a 3D movie is blurry and not at all as enjoyably clear as the normal version. It took weeks for Guardians of the Galaxy to have a non-3D release at our closest (15 away) location and by that point all the excitement was minimized to the point where we figured we'd just wait to watch it at home since it was downgraded to a smaller cinema room with no 3D and lesser quality audio. If we have 60" TV at home and 5.1 audio, why watch the movie at the higher price for a lesser experience when I could buy the blu ray for the cost of 2 tickets?
We also have AVX options from time to time and I actually prefer this and prefer the option to pick a preferential seat but this higher cost option may not be on par with what people want to experience.
So in summary, if you want more people heading to the movies, drop all the gimmicky BS and just give people the movies or at the very least, get rid of 2 x 3D screenings and have 1 x 3D and 1 x normal big screen with good audio.
I think another major factor is that people no longer consume content according to the strict and narrow release windows that content producers prefer.
DVD, DVR, on-demand streaming, binge watching, etc have immunized us against the hype industry that got people to line up for the midnight showings of new blockbuster releases.
As soon as we got comfortable with "we'll see it... whenever", well, game over.
Log in or piss off.
Also, the quality of your home theater is pretty damn good these days. When I was a kid we had a 24-inch low-def tube with two front-facing speakers. There's a huge difference in the experience between watching that little thing and seeing Jurassic Park in the theater. But today? Everybody's got a 50-inch HD flat panel and 5.1 (or better) surround. Nobody can argue the 24-inch tube was a "better experience" than the theater. But today...eh. For an awful lot of things I'd prefer to watch it at home anyway. Plus my couch is more comfortable than the theater seats, I can pause it when I need to use the bathroom, rewind if I missed something, have a beer, and popcorn costs $0.25 instead of $8.
And it's not like you have to wait that long. Used to be you had to wait a year or more after it left theaters for something to show up at Blockbuster. But these days? Biggest movie of the year was Guardians of the Galaxy. Theater release: August 21. Digital download available November 18th. Blu-ray December 9th. There isn't that feeling that, "hmmm, I'd like to see this movie, and if I don't go to the theater it's going to be a year before I can..." Today, if you miss it in theaters you'll see it at home in 3 months.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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."
There certainly have evolved some rather sad trends. Average shot length in Hollywood films has plunged to the point that some films seem more like a jumble of barely coherent vignettes. I watch a Hitchcock film from the 1950s or a Sergio Leone film, and you see these incredibly long takes. I'm thinking specifically of the final standoff at the graveyard in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, or the even more drawn out opening railway station scene from Once Upon A Time In The West. Men like Hitchcock and Leone were bold directors who made highly commercial films that challenged the viewer, and they weren't the only ones. Can you imagine The Godfather, or even moreso The Godfather II being made today?
You're right. Filmmakers, from the writers to the directors to the cinematographers to the editors and other post-production teams have become incredibly lazy, despite having budgets in some cases that would made the great filmmakers of past generations spin. A movie like Psycho, for instance, was made with Hitchcock's TV crew, and not his usual movie team. The awful remake probably cost, in adjusted dollars, ten times as much, and, apart from any other flaws, the actual quality of the filmwork was dreadful.
Good movies are still being made, some on budgets so low that a shoestring would be an improvement, but mainstream Hollywood is just turning into one homogeneous steaming pile of dreck.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Alcohol is no worse than sodas in the theater, and aids with the digestion of the drivel on the screen.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz