“A casual relationship with reality”
Categories: Movies
It's not news that this year, box office numbers have been down. It's a record slump, Hollywood hasn't had a slump this bad ever, 19 weeks straight of numbers down from last year.
One of the reasons that a lot of people have been suggesting is that people are increasingly staying home and watching DVDs. I don't think that's quite it, though. Yeah, all things being equal, people might rather stay home, avoid the crowds, but the big problem there is that DVDs have a built in disadvantage: They're not new. DVDs don't have the draw of a summer event movie. Granted, rising ticket prices make not going to the movies a much more attractive option, but I don't think it accounts for everything.
The other popular theory, which I think plays a huge part in this, is the general lack of quality of the summer movies. Let's face it, even if you get into the big tentpole movies, the formula — lots of noise, lots of action, lots of CG — is getting a little tired.
I have another theory: The industry has painted itself into a corner. There's a couple of components to this, but to understand it, you need to look at the actual mechanics of how box office numbers are down. Typically in the past, when a big movie opens, it created a "halo" effect that raised the box office numbers for other movies. People would go to the theater expecting to see the weekend's big new release and either show up too late or find it sold out. Those people already were at the theater, so they settled on another movie, thus creating spill-over that drove overall box-office numbers. If you look at the numbers this year, that halo effect isn't happening. I don't remember which weekend it was, but a few weekends ago, there was a huge opening film, yet the film in tenth place didn't even break a million dollars for the weekend. That's very unusual for a summer movie.
So, why isn't the halo effect there? Well, I think a big part of the problem is online ticket sales. I buy nearly all of my movie tickets online, it's more convenient and I don't have to stand in line like a chump. And I'm willing to bet that increasing numbers of people are purchasing their tickets online for the same reasons, it just makes sense. However there's a downside for the industry. For each person who purchases tickets online, the opportunity for them to become a halo customer has gone away. They'll either be able to purchase their tickets or they won't.
This is compounded by the fact that as people buy more tickets online, they sell out at the box office sooner. So people that don't buy their tickets online have an increased chance of not catching the movie they want to see. Now, logically this should result in more of a halo effect, but it doesn't because people catch on pretty quick. If you can't get to the theater really early, just stay the hell home 'cause you ain't gonna get to see it. Online ticket sales ends up costing the theaters both potential online customers and potential walk-up customers.
Another component is that there's more theaters and more screens. Again, this goes against intuition, more theaters should mean more movie watchers, and it does for the weekend's big opener. But by increasing the ability for people to catch their preferred movie, the less they're going to be a halo customer. This technically shouldn't be a problem, because the total number of people buying tickets hasn't changed. But what happens when people don't get to see the movie they want is that a certain percentage of them will return the next day or the next weekend to catch that movie. So for those people, you get two tickets for every one failed attempt to catch that movie. The key however is failed attempts at seeing a movie. This also explains why the week after week drop off of a given event's movies is also increasingly severe.
I'd imagine that it only takes a little bit of these changes to bring box office numbers down, especially if the movies themselves aren't something to write home about. The funny thing is, the core of the problem here is the increased focus on opening weekend numbers, which creates the consumer impression that if they aren't seeing a movie opening weekend, they're second-class movie-goers. Ultimately, Hollywood's efforts to generate bigger and bigger weekend numbers are the main cause of shrinking numbers.
It would be ironic if it wasn't the same pattern that happens in every other industry time and time again. Hollywood was due for a correction, and that correction is happening now.
posted by Mark Kawakami at July 07, 2005, 08:07 PM // permalink // (3) Comments