Richard Corliss of Time Magazine wrote an interesting piece on the poor box office performance so far this summer. I don’t often write about such articles, as they are not about runaway production or film incentives specifically. However, the overall economic health of the industry is important to those issues, naturally, and I am going to try and expand the scope of this site accordingly.
According to Corliss, May 2010 was 11% below the previous year for the same time and attendance was also off 19%. To be fair, 2009 was a record breaking year at the box office. According to the MPAA’s 2009 Market Statistics Report (available in the report library), total box office for the US & Canada was $10.6 billion in 2009, which was 10% higher than 2008′s $9.6 billion. Thus the “poor” box office performance thus far in 2010 only seems dismal relative to 2009. Compared to 2008 and earlier, however, this years performance is about average…in terms of dollars spent. But if one thinks May was bad, June is not off to a good start according to Corliss:
Then last weekend, four more films opened: Get Him to the Greek, Killers, Marmaduke and Splice. They all “underperformed,” in industry parlance, marking the first June weekend in five years that no new movie earned $20 million at the box office. The weekend gross dropped a parlous 28% from the same frame last year, despite a hefty rise in ticket prices.
Why was 2009 such a busy year for Hollywood? The reasons are many, but I think Corliss summed it up rather well:
All through the Great Recession, Hollywood enjoyed a relative boom. Last year the domestic box office — the revenue from movie theaters in the U.S. and Canada — exceeded $10 billion for the first time ever. Now the numbers look anorexic, big-budget films are flopping left and right, and studio bosses have begun wondering what has gone so horribly wrong. Is the recent downturn a blip in the business, or a harbinger of the end of America’s long love affair with paying to see picture shows? Have audiences suddenly decided, “Moviegoing — that’s so 2009″?
Ahh, 2009….The summer season opened with a predictably profitable May menu of remakes (Star Trek), sequels (Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian), prequels (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and Pixars (Up)….Then, in early June, came the comedy smash The Hangover, which opened to $45 million and eventually took in $277 million on a $35 million budget. For the rest of 2009, the hits just kept on coming, often in surprise packages: a South African sci-fi parable (District 9), a strong-woman sports drama (The Blind Side) and an indie horror film (Paranormal Activity) that earned $150 million worldwide — 10,000 times its $15,000 budget.
The gold rush continued through the first quarter of 2010, when James Cameron’s eco-epic racked up most of its $749 million domestic take, the highest in film history. As soon as the Avatar avalanche abated, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland stormed in and soon joined Avatar as one of just six films to have earned more than $1 billion worldwide; for the first time ever, two films had crossed that magic threshold in the same year.
It seems that Hollywood “swamis” assumed that future success was a sure thing. After all, with many American’s still out of work and trying to save money, a night at the movies is still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available. Moreover, the technological gains made with 3-D film were truly amazing and a film shot in the three dimensional format (but shot well with purpose) like Avatar offered many a new reason to return to the cinemas. Despite this, the offerings from Hollywood have been lackluster at best:
Nor does the rest of the summer look so rosy for the industry. Instead of a reliable blockbuster like Transformers for the Fourth of July, we have M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, another stab at movie-izing a kids’ TV show. Hollywood has learned the lesson that came too late to the wise guys on Wall Street: no industry is assured of ever rising profits. And at least for now, Hollywood has lost its audience-enticing mojo. Let’s see why.
Corliss offers 7 reasons why things are not going well at the box office, four of which I comment on below:
1. The Boom Wasn’t All That Boomy
The five years from 2005 to 2009 showed remarkably consistent ticket sales, all in the range of 1.39 billion to 1.42 billion, according to movie-stats blog the Numbers. Indeed, in 2009 moviegoers bought no more tickets (1.42 billion) than they did in 1997; the 62% increase in box office revenue, from $6.51 billion to $10.65 billion, was entirely due to the gradual hike in prices. But the bust could be real: if current trends hold, the number of admissions this year will be 1.27 billion, the lowest since 1996. Historical note: None of the recent years comes anywhere near the 4 billion tickets sold in 1946, back before TV gave Americans a free, at-home option for watching entertainment. That’s three times the tickets, when the U.S. population was half what it is today.
I thought it was somewhat unnecessary for Corliss to mention the “4 billion tickets sold” in 1946 when the population was half what it is today. As he notes, its not practical to compare current admissions to 1946 because TV was not an option in 1946 and neither was the internet, video stores etc. Moreover, many American’s lived in cities and urban centers (the suburbs were yet to come) and by and large did not own automobiles.
2. It’s the Movies, Stupid
In the 1940s, filmgoing was a habit; the average person went three times a week. Today it’s a habit for some — the under-25s, which is why Hollywood aims its product at them — but an event for most. The irregular attendee may scan the listings each week but won’t necessarily go see anything. To get beyond the core audience, the studios must create something that is either new or better, at least by the industry’s definition of quality. Who can explain why The Blind Side, the umpteenth sports-inspirational, or The Hangover, the 463rd rowdy-boys comedy, became such a megahit? Well, they did, and whatever that elusive essence, Hollywood hasn’t been able to bottle it this year.
I’m not sure what Corliss was trying to say here. He seems to suggest that films like “The Blind Side” and “The Hangover” were hits because they attracted people to the theater that were “beyond the core audience” and, therefore, implies that more of these types of films should be produced. Is that what he is saying? The problem with duplicating such success is that it’s impossible to predict what will be a hit and what will flop.
3. Where Are the Sequels of the Future?
Once upon a time, even the biggest hits were one-offs. Nobody made a Ben-Hur II or The Sound of More Music or Gone With the Wind: Tomorrow Is Today. Then, in the ’70s, Hollywood invented two kinds of sequels: the organic (The Godfather Part II, the Star Wars trilogy) and the opportunistic (inessential follow-ups to Jaws, The Sting, The Exorcist, etc.). Sequels became the industry’s answer to perpetuating a brand name. Today the problem is not that there are too many, but that there aren’t enough new hits that warrant sequels. The joke is that Hollywood has become so sequel-dependent, it has forgotten how to make new hits.It happens that we’re late in the cycles of many franchises, which often hit the wall after three films. They get more expensive to make and usually show diminishing returns. Was there a compelling argument, beyond the need for greed, to make Ocean’s Thirteen or Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs? Will Pirates of the Caribbean, rebooting after a four-year hiatus for summer 2011, rekindle the excitement of its first episode? Shrek Forever After proves that even a green ogre can be overexposed. Whereas the organic sequels — the Lord of the Rings, Twilight and Harry Potter franchises — kept expanding their audiences by offering narrative twists and character growth instead of rote repetition.
At this point, Corliss seems to be contradicting himself. With this, Corliss is now bemoaning sequels. But earlier in the article, Corliss said part of the problem with this summer season was lack of sequels: “Instead of a reliable blockbuster like Transformers for the Fourth of July, we have M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender.”
So which is it? This summer lack’s a “reliable blockbuster” in the form of a Transformers sequel, but when it releases said film (Transformers 3) next summer, he would label it a lame “rote repetition”.
4. All Movie Ideas Have Finally Been Used Up
Genres have shelf lives too. One hit spawns a glut of like-minded films, and eventually the format exhausts itself and the audience. Nearly a quarter-century after Porky’s and its spawn, Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up revived the randy, guy-centric comedy. After a few years, the robust grosses dissipated, and Get Him to the Greek doesn’t spark hopes for any further extension of the Apatow genre. Other genres, like rom-com spy movies (Killers), Arabian adventures (Prince of Persia) and possibly even the gore-fest horror film, may have reached their sell-by dates because audiences have seen it all so many times before. Richard Schickel, TIME’s longest-serving film critic, once said about the challenge of reviewing Hollywood’s summer product, “It’s not that they’re bad movies, it’s that they’re all the same bad movie.” After frequent exposure to similar experiences, the mass audience may get the same sinking feeling.
I really hated this one. First of all, this could have been said decades ago. Following the Joseph Campbell Hero Journey formula, one could say all ideas were used up centuries ago as even ancient religions shared so many commonalities. Everything is derivative. But no new ideas? This needs to be qualified. Take Chris Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.” Yes, Batman was nothing new and close to ten films about the character preceded it. More generally, Nolan’s film was “just another comic book film.” And while these statements may be true, “The Dark Knight” did offer us something new. Nolan took the character and the genre to a new place (which attracted people beyond the core audience) and his next outing, I am sure, will not be a retread. It may always be a case of the “same old story” (comic film, slasher, drunk comedy, cgi family etc.) with any given film, but all stories are not told equally. While I have seen a “Ghost Rider” film, I have yet to see a well-made “Ghost Rider.” Telling a story that has been told before is nothing new, but let’s not condemn Hollywood for lacking creative new ideas when they offer us a film that tells the same old story well…in a way we have not seen before. Reimagining and rote repetition are not the same thing Mr. Corliss.
Finally, while Corliss painted a grim picture for the major studios, he does so through the box office lens only. The box office represents a tiny fraction of Hollywood’s revenue, if any at all. The real bread and butter is from DVD & Blu-Ray sales, which are generally three times more than total box office receipts.
To read the remaining reasons for Hollywood’s woes, click HERE
