Hollywood's Bad Summer Movies Are Driving a Decline in Movie Ticket Sales (fastcompany.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: While some people may point at The Emoji Movie as the root of all that is wrong with Hollywood, The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem goes much deeper than a single misfire featuring Patrick Stewart as a poop emoji. WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales. On Aug. 2, AMC shares dropped 27% in one day, the WSJ reports. While films like Beauty and the Beast, Wonder Woman, and Get Out fared well at the box office, they were the anomalies in a year full of box office disappointments. Instead of giving moviegoers more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films, Hollywood keeps throwing gobs of money at an unwanted fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, more Transformers movies, and putting $175 million into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and then clutching their pearls in shock that no one wanted to see them.

Comments

Speaking just for me

[geek]

I simply can't divorce Hollywood from it's politics. I can't just go and enjoy a movie anymore. They insist on injecting their dogmas on to me. Before the movie I see nothing but politics from the actors, telling me how awful a person I am. During the movie it's an endless barrage of extremism masked as social justice.

Making things worse, they want me to "enjoy" this in a shitty movie theater surrounded by loud people that can't put their cellphones away. All for the low low price of 15 bucks a person not including the 25 bucks in terrible food.

Pretty rare these days too that a movie isn't a sequel or prequel or sidequel in some "franchise" that sucked from the start but brought in a lot of teenagers so the stiffs in suits thought it would make sense to throw billions of dollars at it.

I jokingly said to my wife the other night that there wasn't even anything I wanted to pirate anymore, it's just gotten that bad.

Re:Speaking just for me

[__aaclcg7560]

No one said you had to watch all the Transformer movies.

Re:Speaking just for me

[PopeRatzo]

the unrealistically scrawny and weak female lead carrying a black dongstaff riding a speeder that looks like a dildo with the young black buck love interest adventure in their fight against the evil straight white man and being followed around by a small white cuck-bot the white male viewer is supposed to identify as while the hispanic fighter ace saves the day after being commanded to go in by the asian general and the only guy that dies is also a white male. convenient.

You watched Star Wars and that's what you came away with?

You might have bigger problems than the SJWs, my friend.

Re:Speaking just for me

[mjwx]

I simply can't divorce Hollywood from it's politics. I can't just go and enjoy a movie anymore. They insist on injecting their dogmas on to me

That's your problem, I suggest seeing a therapist about these kinds of paranoid delusions. Your white privilege is as safe as it ever was. Hollywood only has one dogma, that is to make money. The problem Hollywood has is that movies are no longer the only game in town. I'm not just talking about TV and Netflix, video games are now a significant form of entertainment amongst most people. Hollywood for so many decades never had any competition, they were able to keep a stranglehold on the production and distribution of the majority of entertainment, the internet has largely ruined this for them with games and streaming services taking over the production and piracy dealing with the distribution. Hollywood has simply not changed with new technologies. They're still stuck in the 80's when we had no other choice but to buy their crap (and I remember the 80's... they made some shit movies).

I jokingly said to my wife the other night that there wasn't even anything I wanted to pirate anymore, it's just gotten that bad.

Could she hear you from the kitchen, or was this when you put her shoes back in the drawer.

Your problem isn't the imaginary "dogmas", your problem is they aren't pandering to you, ironically its because you're even further behind the times than Hollywood.

Re:Speaking just for me

[quantaman]

Let's be honest, the only reason of Carry Fisher's success was the bikini scene RofJ, not the depth of the Princess Leia.

So was Mark Hamill's success a result of his brilliant acting or did he have a shirtless scene I forgot about?

Let's be honest, Carry Fisher and Mark Hamill were both decent performers who achieved fame beyond their talent because they were well cast in a massively successful movie.

To insist that Carry Fisher's success was only because of her bikini scene is the definition of sexism.

Re:Speaking just for me

[oic0]

When you politicize your content, you alienate half the population no matter which direction you lean. Nothing new there. Hollywood seems to have forgotten this because they think California is the world.

Sequels and remakes

[hambone142]

I couldn't believe they did another "Flatliners".

When we watched the previews a few weeks ago we saw this as well as 4 (yes, FOUR) remakes of previous movies.

Hollywood deserves to go broke if this is all they can come up with.

If I see another comic book movie, I'm gonna puke.

Re:Nothing new under the sun

[PopeRatzo]

We're just getting way past the saturation point with entertainment and stories of every kind. We need a break, and then afterward we can go back to telling and hearing the same old tales again, just as our ancestors have done for millennia. Maybe we could even do something useful for a while. I have even been thinking about cutting the cord on my Netflix subscription... ...and I'm not any kind of anti-TV nutter.

When did our ancestors take a "break" from telling stories?

Re:Leftist Agenda or $$$ - Choose One

[MightyMartian]

I don't think anyone is staying away from the Emoji movie because of an evil leftist agenda. They're staying away because it sucks, and because streaming services like Netflix and Amazon can provide better entertainment at a lot better price.

but bad movies won't get the blame

[arbiter1]

Hollywood will blame Piracy as reason for weak ticket sales and why we need more tougher law's.

Hmmm.

[Bartles]

WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales.

If you raise prices and revenue decreases, it means that prices are too high. There's a simple fix to their problem.

Valerian

[Anonymous Coward]

Here was a non-Hollywood movie that got killed in the reviews. The first half had no faults, was kick-ass, and to me was worth the price of the ticket. And you know why many people didn't like it? Because it did not fit the superhero mold that people still seem to love. Face it, Hollywood gives you what sells tickets.

Holy fuck you whining motherfuckers

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ slashdot comments have become a pile of shit because of you. It's one thing to come in to a thread specifically about some bullshit gender politics and hear people whining about "the left" and "SJWs" ruining everything (and why don't well a just go back to the 50s where being white and male made one instantly higher status than anyone else because I live with my parent's and can't get a girlfriend and blah blah blah and millennial snowflakes whine too much!)...

But we can't even talk about hollywood making shitty movies and probably blaming it on piracy without a bunch of you fuckwits crawling out of the woodwork? Jesus Christ, fuck all of you.