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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.
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.
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.
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.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Emoji Movie may be all that's wrong with Hollywood, but Baby Driver and Dunkirk are what is right with it.
Neither does Hollywood. But there will be a Pirates 6!
" WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, "
If I want to see teenies checking their smartphone I just take a look on the sidewalk, no need to go to a movie theater.
Baby Driver is good.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hollywood will blame Piracy as reason for weak ticket sales and why we need more tougher law's.
There are still too many white males in prominent roles in movies. Movie revenue will increase once all white males are cast in unimportant or comedy relief roles then phased out entirely. Hollywood must boycott white males if they want to succeed.
It only looks leftist because of how far gone you are. Hollywood actually has a corporate agenda.
The heavy left-wing political slant most Hollywood stars and writers want to impart on films isn't helping sales either. But IMO, the lack of movies worth the price of admission to see is the biggest issue.
I actually enjoy going to the theater to see a movie sometimes. I'm not much of a sports person so I don't go to see games. A good movie is an excuse to get out of the house with the family and to buy bragging rights that we saw a newly released film long before it comes out on video. All the complaints about unruly crowds and teens using their phones through entire movies? I've encountered a bit of that, but it's more the exception than the rule - at least at the theaters I go to.
But the movie has to be worth seeing! With so many sequels and remakes, there's not a whole lot left! Anything in one of those categories is best rented and watched at home, IMO. Some of the remakes are mildly amusing or entertaining, but practically never rise to the level of justifying buying a group of adult movie tickets at over $11 each, plus popcorn or sodas or what-not at hugely inflated theater prices.
I think the superhero movies from Marvel and DC have done so well because there were so many good stories to tell there. We have many decades of comic books being printed that were all but ignored on the big screen until now. Even so? You've still got Hollywood trying to milk some of the best known ones (Spiderman, Batman and Superman) with regular re-releases of films about them, sometimes rehashing the same basic story different ways. It feels like the producers and directors are making these more for themselves than for the audience?
But sometimes you've just had enough of seeing yet another superhero movie, too. Then what? The Fast and the Furious movies started out as ideal summer action/fantasy films - but by this last one? It just went over the top on stretching your belief. "I'll just push this torpedo that's flying here and change its direction." Come on! A good car movie needs to have scenes that at least make some attempt at being plausible.
And some will disagree, but I feel like the "horror movie" genre was all played out by some time in the 1990's, if not earlier. 90% of them are pretty much formula material, aimed at an audience young enough to not have watched a lot of the older stuff first. Nobody else would find much of it worthwhile at all. And again, any of the true classics they came up with got rehashed with SO many sequels it became a farce. (Anyone up for another Chucky movie? Or hey, maybe we could redo the Exorcist one more time?)
Personally, I'm into sci-fi more than most genres, and Hollywood manages to do a decent job with that occasionally. But not often. And worse yet? When they promise a lot but get it all wrong, they alienate people who you managed to drag along who weren't really into sci-fi but resigned to give it a chance. How many times will they try again when future sci-fi movies come out?
I was just telling a friend of mine earlier today ..... as much as we all loved "Office Space", I think I'm glad they didn't try to do a sequel. I mean, it's another obvious cash grab for Hollywood if they did. But it would probably be awful. I think you could do it right, at least for one more movie. But you'd need to tell a whole new story about a different company, with a whole new cast of interesting characters. And for comic relief, re-insert a couple of the originals. Maybe Lumbergh finds a new job as a middle manager at the new company, since crappy middle managers always seem to manage to keep getting re-hired at places in real life. I think instead, they'd screw it all up trying to tell some stupid story about how all the characters find themselves doing the same kind of work at a new place.
I've had so many bad experiences at local theaters, the IMAX's are always full so you have to stand in line too long to get a good seat, parking garages are full on the weekends, the food and drink is too expensive and poor quality, people on phones and noisy eaters, the quality of the movies are mediocre. Then top it off, Hollywood is insulting people by making remakes and putting social justice in them.
I'd rather just buy or redbox the blue ray and order a pizza, cheaper, I can pause the movie, and no annoying people.
I even avoided the Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and waited for it on blue ray.
And do I really want to see another Star Trek where they destroy the Enterprise again?
No.
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.
Pirates of the Caribbean 5
Production budget: $230,000000
Worldwide gross: $781,537,470
Transformers 5
Production budget: $217,000,000
Worldwide gross: $586,549,576
Somebody, somewhere wanted to see them, which is why Hollywood keeps making them.
Who invented emojis? Millennials. Who invented millennials? Leftists. Checkmate, Martian.
I bet you aren't even from Mars.
https://www.pornhub.com/view_v...
Got there when the show was about to start. Spent a good 10 minutes watching nothing but ads. Then the previews. I hate previews, they tend to give away the major plot points, or show funny stuff that doesn't show up in the movie. Some 30 minutes after the movie was supposed to start it started.
// $4 for $0.33 worth of popcorn? Ok, I don't have a microwave in your theater. But still..
/// $5 for sweetened ice tea, when I prefer mine unsweetened? Remind me again why I never see movies in theaters.
I snuck in a bottle of water and some trail mix
Great move, bad experience.
/ snuck in - they were in my pockets, pretty obvious to anyone who cared
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.
You can't blame someone for feeling more virtuous than a Trump voter.
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The rights and the lefts both think they have the moral high ground and pompously profess to be good guys.
The centrists meanwhile, entirely disconnected from the frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric that the rights and lefts are so maddeningly in love with, live far happier and more productive and rewarding lives.
ticket sales are down in the US because the movies are geared to the Chinese market. They're less desirable (weaker dialog so it's easier to dub, watered down plots to make it through Chinese censors) but folks still go see them, they just don't keep going again and again. Profits in the States are down but that's dwarfed by the profits in the US.
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My understanding that winter has been growing as a time to release blockbuster movies. The Last Jedi was delayed from May 2017 to December 2017. The LOTR and Hobbit series were released then as well.
Real TFA doesn't even mention emojis OR "more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films".
All that was injected into discourse by the "writer" of that blogpost masquerading as TFA.
Cause... clickbait.
Basically, it boils down to more expensive tickets...
A summer without a real mega-blockbuster cause all the slots were taken by expensive non-starters or franchises which have overextended their welcome and overpaid for the production...
And talk about earlier streaming options making distributors nervous. Very nervous.
Also... Chinese investors. But mostly it's about streaming.
No agendas.
Nor is it about genre-bending horrors and chicks who punch people.
It's about distributors riding their favorite geldings along the road - when a strange mechanical contraption suddenly roared passed them, leaving them and their animals shaken and scared in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes.
And then a different machine FLEW over them! GASP!
Is this the end of the horse industry as we know it?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Don't like the prices? Don't go. Don't like the experience? Don't go.
And here we are discussing why less and less people are attending the cinema (or buying BluRay/DVD anymore).
Because you end up sitting through 30 minutes of ads and "you wouldn't steal or car, please don't steal our movie" crap before the movie starts. You can't even skip it in a lot of BluRay discs now.
I know what would get me to the cinema more:
1. Banning mobile phones in the room.
2. $10 tickets all day every day.
3. No ads, only one or two previews.
4. No "stealing this movie is a crime" lies.
5. (The real clincher) Something worth actually seeing.
This seems no surprise to me. Movie experience is essentially a constant. TVs keep getting better and bigger. I find little difference these days watching movies at home. In fact until we've had a 10 foot projection screen in our media room since 2008. I had a tri-beam data-grade projector back in 2000 that I powered with a myHD card. I haven't cared that much about seeing things in the theater since the introduction of Blu-Ray. With shows like Game of Thrones you essentially get a movie fix once a week minimum anyway. Here is the main thing. Learn to delay gratification. Once your watching everything 6 months delayed, your watching the same amount of content and basically the same amount of enjoyment for a lot lower cost point (which helps pay for your kick-ass media room).
Letter To Iran
Hollywood does not produce poor entertainment. Any dip in revenues is because of those pesky pirates!.
On a more serious note, how does this year compare to other years than 2016? Seems like one year comparison is a small sample.
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.
Or, the movie theaters jacked the prices (again) and attendance dropped (again).
This need have nothing to do with a sudden change in the quality of the content. It sucked last year; it sucks this year. But every time they raise prices, they increase the likelihood that the population that doesn't otherwise care how much the content sucks is still going to go find something else cheaper to do.
Funny, I didn't realize a 45-year old Japanese engineer working for NTT DoCoMo is considered a millennial...
Box office ticket sales have hovered around 1.3 million per year for over two decades. Some years have sold a couple million more, some have sold a couple million less, but the trend is relatively flat. There has been no huge drop in people going to see movies.
Maybe it's because the price of movies keeps going up and a significant percentage of the population has seen their wages stagnate.
Does anybody go to a movie so that they can hear characters saying "fuck" and "shit"?
I avoid such movies if I can. I suspect others do also. The laziness and incompetence of writers that result in the inclusion of such words causes other aspects of the movie to degrade. Fewer people want to see inferior movies.
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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.
Yes you can, if they're not.
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Tell that to people who believe that "Since I made X money last year I should make at least as much this year".
Except it's not even years but quarters.
From TFA:
"If Walt Disney Co. had released its live-action "Beauty and the Beast" one month later than its March 17 debut, "we'd be looking at this [quarter] a whole lot differently," said Mark Zoradi, CEO at Cinemark Holdings Inc., the nation's third-largest exhibitor."
They are literally hanging the hopes of the entire industry on a single movie.
Which it's another remake. Of a cartoon fairy tale about joys and wonders of Stockholm syndrome and human sacrifice.
But had it been released only a month later...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And at the very root the issue is that the beancounters run the whole industry these days. The process began in the 70ties but then it was the cheesemakers who just bought the studios and by mistake did a good thing - gave opportunities to young directors to experiment a bit a make movies for young people. Thus we got all those directors considered icons of the second half of 20th century.
But some of those innovative movies flopped on release while becoming all time classic (e.g. Blade runner).
Today the marketeers won't take any risks with such lavish budgets. No experiments, no original vision. Research says there are still enough people to buy Fsat and Furious 675 so that's what we will do.
But maybe audience is getting wiser and seeing that TV shows have way bigger balls than big movies the interest is shifting.
See also all the complaints about the theater going experience....
> The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem goes much deeper than a single misfire
Please allow me to interrupt here -- Ya think??
It couldn't possibly be that Hollywood is substituting eye candy and big set pieces for an actual story that works? That they've completely underestimated how much the public, yea, even that unwashed billy-bob public that is supposed to only be interested in naked breasts and explosions, might want a compelling story that makes sense? (And maybe, since you brought it up, that nobody really thought a poop emoji voiced by Patrick Stewart was funny?)
Nah. It must be them damned downloaders.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It is kinda difficult not to be.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Emoji's are just an evolution of emoticons - Text based pictograms that were used as early as 1986. :-/
Remakes abound. Yet writers want more money, for stuff written mostly before almost all of the people on slashdot were even born, myself included and I'm over 50. Just think about that a moment, 50 years.
Had to laugh recently about how the stupid leftists thought Wonder Woman was great. Feminist stuff in it, etc. Then they found out that the Koch brothers funded it and now they don't even want to watch it. What dimwits.
I really enjoyed that movie and was quite surprised to find out it was considered a flop.
As it happens, I've read an intelligent comment on this matter before, right here on Slashdot. It was not yours.
guises — December 2016
This is why you call the "right" wing is so often referred to as neoliberals.
The original liberals opposed small government (the monarchy) in favour of individual rights. Then individual rights took a wrong turn and became the oversized tumour of the social democratic state (blame Napoleon and Bismarck and FDR, who all had a hand in this).
The jury is still out on whether small-government Libertarianism mainly delivers conceptual rights that the majority of the population can't actually eat, and whether bearing the most precious of precious Amex cards really does make you an elite silverback, once all moderating government is well and truly brushed to the sidelines.
In all of political history, we had a comfortable, politically independent middle class for all of about 30 years (1950-1980), in a small number of confederacies, of mainly Anglo and European heritage.
Now we've returned to the other extreme, where the wealthy can purpose just about any political privilege desired, burdened with the least possible modicum of pretense of supporting the public interest.
I preferred the original form of freedom, the freedom one could take to the bank, without already being wealthy.
That piece of shit "actor" Charlie Hannam must go. I want to never hear a peep about this shitface piece of shit evere again
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
For the same reason Mohammed is such a popular name - conservative people have no imagination.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
One of the problems I've been running into is that movies these days are extremely long. Now, this could be seen as a great thing (the value versus the price), but because it's in a movie theater, you can't exactly pause the movie if you need to use the restroom, and when you're seeing a movie that goes beyond 3 hours, it's sometimes a necessity, especially if foolish enough to order a soda before the movie starts. So, almost always, I miss about ten minutes of the movie that can sometimes be a really important moment of the show (which you don't know because you've never seen the movie before). It's part of why I see fewer movies in the theater and just wait until I can watch it at home. There were a couple of movies I wanted to watch this year, but I knew the length of them was going to be problematic, and couple that with people who feel the need to check their cell phones during the movie, and you start to see why people see fewer movies in the theater.
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