In 2010 total worldwide Hollywood box office was around $31.8 billion, sharply up from 2009. In 2011 that dropped by 3% and Hollywood and movie critics have been kvetching about it ever since. This morning on CBS’s Sunday Morning they featured an opinion piece on the decline in revenues that I found jaw-droppingly obtuse. The assertion of the critic: that the reason for the decline is that Hollywood didn’t produce enough blockbusters.
For reasons I’ll explain later I find this completely circular.
Back at the end of 2011 Roger Ebert wrote a more thoughtful consideration of the decline in revenues. He listed six reasons:
- No must-see mass-market movie
- Ticket prices are too high.
- Unpleasant theater experience.
- Refreshment prices are too high.
- Competition from other forms of delivery.
- Lack of choice (the movieplexes all show the same list of the same, indistinguishable pictures)
He concludes:
The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It’s the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can’t depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.
I think he’s onto something with his last two points and, maybe, with the third but I think the others are misplaced criticisms or, as I mentioned above, circular.
Everybody complains about the high prices at the movie theater but IMO that’s mostly just misplaced nostalgia. In the golden year of 1939 movie tickets cost a quarter a piece and you could get a bag of popcorn and a coke for a dime and a nickel, respectively. Relative to median income of $1,800 that was just about .01%. Today a movie ticket costs $8 and popcorn and a beverage will set you back another $12. Relative to today’s median income that’s….01%.
Let me explain why I think that the reasoning on blockbusters is circular. The big production and distribution companies have a strategy for making money. The strategy, essentially, is to win the lottery: produce big, expensive, megahits and make money through worldwide distribution. Worldwide distribution in these big, glossy megahits implies lots of action and not much dialogue. Drawing room comedies don’t translate well (not to mention social satire or drama).
It’s not the only possible strategy. Most people don’t realize it but nowadays the viewership for Bollywood movies is bigger than that for Hollywood movies. The Bollywood strategy is different from the Hollywood strategy. Basically, it’s give people what they want, make the picture for a low cost, and do it in volume. I’ve only seen a handful of Bollywood pictures but every one of them seems like an explosion in the genre factory. They’re combinations of Busby Berkeley musicals, pretty boys, pretty girls, love story, family drama, comedy, and action/adventure. In my experience they tend not to be lurid, violent, or explicitly sexual.
When I think of why the Hollywood strategy is failing I blame Michael Bay. To my eye his movies are big, loud, muddled, incoherent action sequences in which the only role for women is to be leered at. That can be fun for a few minutes but gets tedious when stretched into hours and worse when replicated into endless numbered sequels, each more haphazardly made and thinly plotted than the last.
Worse yet for the Hollywood strategy, its audience is evaporating. Pre-teenage and teenage boys are much more likely to be playing games on their phones, tablets, or game consoles than they are to be going to the movies or even watching them at home so, unsurprisingly, U. S. grosses for videogames are exceeding box office grosses at a significantly lower cost of production and distribution cost.
IMO television, cable, and Internet streaming will increasingly be the sources of the variety that Roger Ebert mentions and Hollywood pictures will continue a long, dreary slide.
Update
To clarify the point I’m trying to make I don’t think that Hollywood isn’t making as much money as it thinks it should be because it isn’t making enough blockbusters. I think it isn’t making as much money as it thinks it should because it has adopted a strategy that requires it to make ever more ever more expensive blockbusters, it refuses to change that strategy with the times, and that strategy is running out of steam.
I don’t suppose you remember the song “End of an Act,” from Team America?
That’s because Bollywood just churns them formula-style, and government censorship blocks a lot of explicit content. There’s a cultural element to it as well, considering how many of them are melodramatic musicals (and virtually none of them have had any significant commercial success in the US). I’m not exactly eager for a film industry here that’s based around churning out formula movies on a low budget (Sci-Fi network’s “Mansquito” anyone?).
Besides, the teenage audience for the mega-hits might be shrinking, but they’re still the most reliable audience that can be counted on to show up in response to television advertising and buy concessions (the life-blood of the theater business). Why not ride that as long as they can, particularly since it’s much more profitable than trying to make and advertise a bunch of low-budget movies?
The theater business has been fading in importance ever since television was introduced, so I don’t see that as a problem.
Sci-Fi network’s “Mansquito†anyone?
C’mon, man! What about Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus? What about 10.4?
You’re saying that as though it’s a bad thing. Paging M. Reynolds, paging M. Reynolds… 😉
Special mention probably needs to be made about 3-d. It looks like its a unique feature that draws people to the movie in the opening week, who will pay an extra premium, and from comments I’ve read, it repels just as many.
Also, $8 a ticket seems a little low. Around here, which is a low cost area, matinees would run $6 to $8, evenings $10-$12, and 3d a few bucks higher still. The pricing subtly changes the notion of a family night out (if there weren’t fewer family movies anyway) and the number of movies one might see in a theatre over time. But yes, price is relative and some of the competition is cheaper. I’m still surprised to see DVDs in discount bins at gas stations and drug stores for about $4 – $5 that seem like they were out just over a year ago and while not great, they don’t look awful either. They look like something I might watch once, but not want to own.
Support for the $8 ticket price claim.
Well, I am now a Hollywood expert having held not one but two official Hollywood meetings this last week for two of my book series. (Both going out to screenwriters, which is sort of Step Two in a 10 step process.)
I’ll tell you the truth: I’ve met a fair number of moderately important Hollywood types now and they’ve all been smart, well-prepared and amazingly normal. We talked about babies and traffic and
The big driver now is foreign markets. That’s 60% of the market and they don’t buy small movies about Americana. They buy big noisy tentpole pictures. Aliens and monsters and stuff blowing up real good translates across all cultures. If they wanted people discussing philosophy while smoking cigarettes they’d call the French.
Look at it like the car market. You want sexy, low-slung sports cars? You go Italian. You want a muscular luxury beast? German. Reliable? Japanese. You want pick-up trucks, you call the Americans.
Same with movies. We make a particular thing better than anyone else: the Hollywood blockbuster. No one else has the technology, the skilled craftsmen and artists, the experience, the financing, etc… No one else has the great British and Aussie actors. We own Big and Loud.
I’m not saying we couldn’t have a viable domestic market based on some other approach. But we have to sell movies in Japan and Germany and France and what they want is Hollywood blockbusters.
Incidentally, the funny thing about cranking out formula stuff is that it’s as hard or harder in terms of work as doing something entirely original. We did a lot of ghostwriting back in the day. Hard work.
There are economic dis-incentives to originality as well. There’s a reason I write series rather than stand-alones. Publishers won’t get behind a single title like they will a series, and it’s harder for a writer to establish himself.
I’m actually concerned about B*Z*R*K (asterisks inserted to make this harder to search) because it violates formula in a number of ways. It’s fun to be able to say (and honestly, I believe) that readers have never seen anything like this before, but at the same time I’m concerned because readers have never seen anything like this before.
” Step Two in a 10 step process.”
Ooooo, hope it’s not a gateway to a 12-Step Program.