Of course revenue is down. It doesn’t take a genius to see why.
I went out the other day to the megaplex for the first time since I moved in to the area. First I looked up the ticket prices on movie phone. I saw the price and figured it must be a mistake. Movie phone must not give matinee prices for online ticket purchases or something.
Of course, I was wrong. The cost of a matinee movie around here is apparently $8.00. An evening movie is twelve bucks. No freaking way.
I’m not an idiot. In India, they show the same movies for two dollars, in theaters that would make ours look like slums. The chairs have little tables next to you, and during intermission waiters come out with little snacks. You can choose what seats you want on a little touch screen before the movie starts. The chairs are like easy chairs. It’s awesome. If you want less fancy accommodations, you can buy a ticket for the same movie at a cheapo theater for thirty cents. Now, yeah, everything costs less in India. But “Chronicles of Riddick” didn’t cost any less money to make in India. They can’t possibly tell me they have to charge me twelve freaking bucks.
And if they aren’t careful, seeing movies in theaters is going to become just like seeing musicals on Broadway- something that went from a widespread and popular form of entertainment to an expensive proposition that most people rarely do ever. There is a point that is just too much damn money. I can’t imagine ever going to the theater if I had kids to pay for, too. When you look at countries that have thriving movie industries, and when you look at America’s own movie history, you see that the times when theaters thrived were when movies were cheap. Now don’t give me that sob story about ticket sales being down while simultaniously trying to extort me.
Slate had a roundtable with four film critics. One said he was sick of his readers complaining about him reviewing movies they’d never heard of. His question was “why are you blaming me, rather than the people who won’t show the film where you are?”
Longer running times may add to the decline in ticket sales. Not only are there fewer showings per screen, there is also a segment of the population who doesn’t want to commit 3+ hours watching a movie on someone else’s pre-set schedule. They’d rather watch it on DVD when they can start it at their leisure and pause it to take a leak.
There are a number of responses on their message board, the fray, that adequately demolish this.
My oversimplistic response is that I have a life, thank you. I don’t consider movies the most important medium in existence and I don’t pretend to see more than a few movies a year. I don’t have the time or inclination to search out every possible obscure foreign DVD for the all-region player I don’t own any more than you, mr. critic, have the time or inclination to search out every indie CD that gets published in the world. I react to your deliberate and annoying disdain for any movie that gets wide release in the same way that you would react to an article featuring nothing but novels put out by small presses by authors you had never heard of.
Film critics are supposed to see more movies than ordinary folks, and should absolutely champion films that otherwise would not get hyped. But not exclusively in a year-end roundup.
Not really a lie, but ever since Entertainment Tonight started reporting weekend box office figures, we have become obsessed with them. And just reporting raw totals is very misleading. For instance if Movie A grossed 10 million dollars and Movie B grossed 7 million dollars you might think that Movie A is more popular. But what if I told you that Movie A was on three times as many screens than Movie B.
So one thing they do is to compare this weekend to the same weekend of last year.
This year the total box office is 100 million dollars but last year the weekend total was 110 million dollars. Well what does that really tell us? Not a lot really. So this year for many different reasons most weekend totals were off of last year. So this story gets told over and over, week after week, and people think, “Oh my God! Things are awful!” Movies are Dead! I can see huge trends as I have my finger on the pulse of all American movie goers.
I totally agreed with you this morning as I read your post. I don’t think the critics should have to appreciate films just because they have box office appeal. I almost had a heart attack several years ago when my brother asked me why movies like Armageddon didn’t win the Academy Awards!
Well, I think the critics do get carried away with their obscure choices, but I also believe they should point out good movies that I haven’t heard of, and never would have otherwise. I can find out if Spiderman 2 sucked from people I know who saw it opening night. If that’s not good enough, there’s a critic in my local daily who’ll have a review on the day it opens, and Roger Ebert will review it the week before it opens.