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]

I simply can't divorce Hollywood from it's politics. I can't just go and enjoy a movie anymore.

Translation: "I can't believe Star Wars cast a woman in a leading role and didn't show off her tiddies."

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.

Too Many White Males

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Well...

[Yunzil]

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.

Re:Leftist Agenda or $$$ - Choose One

[Anonymous Coward]

Who invented emojis? Millennials. Who invented millennials? Leftists. Checkmate, Martian.

I bet you aren't even from Mars.

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.

It's China

[rsilvergun]

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.

"TFA" is basically a fan-made trailer for real TFA

[denzacar]

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?