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

[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: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.

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.