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By ROGER MOORE
The Orlando Sentinel
It's the movies, stupid. The stupid movies.
Well, that and the $7.50 boxes of popcorn. And the $%&*! cell phones.
The summer of 2005 is shaping up as the worst in recent Hollywood history. Box office is down; actual admissions — human seats sitting on theater seats — are way down.
Not just down from last year. Even if you strip away last year's fluke smash — The Passion of the Christ brought in millions who aren't normally moviegoers — the trends are down and not looking good.
Speculation is rampant that we've reached "the tipping point" (USA Today), with summer box office down 11 percent from a year ago, and that people are breaking a lifelong habit, or not putting down the Game Boy, laptop or iPod long enough to develop it (Los Angeles Times).
Things are so bad that the AMC theater chain is offering their money back to folks who see and don't like Cinderella Man over the July 4 weekend. The Wall Street Journal says that Cinemark is considering copying that idea.
"It may be a little early to write off movie theaters altogether," says Joel Davis, vice president of operations for Premiere Cinemas, operators of theaters in Texas, Alabama and Florida. "But anybody can read the numbers. It hasn't been a great year, attendance-wise."
It's the expense, says a Gallup Poll released Tuesday. Seven in 10 potential moviegoers say they would go more often "if the tickets and concessions cost less money." First-run movie tickets more than $10 in much of the country. Not everybody can afford the $3.50 Diet Coke, and those who can aren't keen on spending that kind of money for a soda.
It's also the rudeness of their fellow patrons, who yak and then threaten to punch out those who shush them, and the incessant cell phones, ringing or being checked for messages (little blue screens are very distracting in a darkened theater).
A poll by cell-phone operator Cingular Wireless showed that 73 percent of moviegoers called cell-phone abuse by others the best reason for skipping a movie. That magic number, 73 percent of people polled, told an Associated Press-AOL poll that they now preferred to see a movie at home.
Part of the problem is the popularity of DVDs, the rising number of home-theater systems.
Hollywood is rolling out DVDs so close to the movie's theatrical release date (to fight video piracy, which hurts studios more than theaters) that it doesn't take a lot of patience to catch The Upside of Anger while the buzz over it still lingers. The theater chains hate this, but it's a fact that the gap between theatrical release and DVD has shrunk to as little as two months, though four months is the new standard.
Any trip to an AMC or Regal Cinemas theater involves a preshow video-entertainment package of promotional interviews, movie trailers (ads themselves) and commercials for cars, candy, soft drinks and the like.
Producer Richard Zanuck (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) griped to the Los Angeles Times that audiences "come to see the film and not to be sold something else."
Why are the theaters showing us commercials, anyway? Aren't they charging enough for popcorn?
Movies lose their audiences faster than ever. When you go to a Batman or The Perfect Man and it's showing on four or six screens, that means that nobody is turned away when they try to see it opening weekend. Great.
But while the movie makes all its money in those early weeks of release, studios pocket most of that cash. The theaters don't earn a larger part of the box office until later in the run.
At that point, though, the movie drops out of sight. Theaters take the hit and make their money selling concessions.
And yet the studios expect theater chains to spend millions to put in digital projectors, which will make theaters even more like the home movie-watching experience.
Could it be, maybe, the quality of the movies that's the real drag here? Star Wars or Batman fanatics might disagree, but this has been a year, and a summer, bereft of that out-of-body-experience movie that has everybody talking and everybody going.
Forty-three percent of those polled by Gallup say better-quality movies would get them to the theater more often. Forty-seven percent of those polled by The AP say movies are "getting worse." A whopping 69 percent say movie stars are negative role models for today's children. The antics of Lindsay Lohan or Russell Crowe or Tom Cruise aren't helping their movies.
Though the polls back this up, you're hard-pressed to hear anybody from the studios admit that the downward slide has anything to do with their churning out movies that any night's channel-surfing will turn up on cable.
Remakes always have been with us. Studios always have recycled successful formulas, plots and occasionally even titles. But making bad new versions of The Longest Yard, The Amityville Horror and War of the Worlds, or creating big-screen takes on ancient TV shows that have been rerun to death (The Honeymooners, Bewitched) is no way to bring back the crowds.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/jump/3249134
The Orlando Sentinel
It's the movies, stupid. The stupid movies.
Well, that and the $7.50 boxes of popcorn. And the $%&*! cell phones.
The summer of 2005 is shaping up as the worst in recent Hollywood history. Box office is down; actual admissions — human seats sitting on theater seats — are way down.
Not just down from last year. Even if you strip away last year's fluke smash — The Passion of the Christ brought in millions who aren't normally moviegoers — the trends are down and not looking good.
Speculation is rampant that we've reached "the tipping point" (USA Today), with summer box office down 11 percent from a year ago, and that people are breaking a lifelong habit, or not putting down the Game Boy, laptop or iPod long enough to develop it (Los Angeles Times).
Things are so bad that the AMC theater chain is offering their money back to folks who see and don't like Cinderella Man over the July 4 weekend. The Wall Street Journal says that Cinemark is considering copying that idea.
"It may be a little early to write off movie theaters altogether," says Joel Davis, vice president of operations for Premiere Cinemas, operators of theaters in Texas, Alabama and Florida. "But anybody can read the numbers. It hasn't been a great year, attendance-wise."
It's the expense, says a Gallup Poll released Tuesday. Seven in 10 potential moviegoers say they would go more often "if the tickets and concessions cost less money." First-run movie tickets more than $10 in much of the country. Not everybody can afford the $3.50 Diet Coke, and those who can aren't keen on spending that kind of money for a soda.
It's also the rudeness of their fellow patrons, who yak and then threaten to punch out those who shush them, and the incessant cell phones, ringing or being checked for messages (little blue screens are very distracting in a darkened theater).
A poll by cell-phone operator Cingular Wireless showed that 73 percent of moviegoers called cell-phone abuse by others the best reason for skipping a movie. That magic number, 73 percent of people polled, told an Associated Press-AOL poll that they now preferred to see a movie at home.
Part of the problem is the popularity of DVDs, the rising number of home-theater systems.
Hollywood is rolling out DVDs so close to the movie's theatrical release date (to fight video piracy, which hurts studios more than theaters) that it doesn't take a lot of patience to catch The Upside of Anger while the buzz over it still lingers. The theater chains hate this, but it's a fact that the gap between theatrical release and DVD has shrunk to as little as two months, though four months is the new standard.
Any trip to an AMC or Regal Cinemas theater involves a preshow video-entertainment package of promotional interviews, movie trailers (ads themselves) and commercials for cars, candy, soft drinks and the like.
Producer Richard Zanuck (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) griped to the Los Angeles Times that audiences "come to see the film and not to be sold something else."
Why are the theaters showing us commercials, anyway? Aren't they charging enough for popcorn?
Movies lose their audiences faster than ever. When you go to a Batman or The Perfect Man and it's showing on four or six screens, that means that nobody is turned away when they try to see it opening weekend. Great.
But while the movie makes all its money in those early weeks of release, studios pocket most of that cash. The theaters don't earn a larger part of the box office until later in the run.
At that point, though, the movie drops out of sight. Theaters take the hit and make their money selling concessions.
And yet the studios expect theater chains to spend millions to put in digital projectors, which will make theaters even more like the home movie-watching experience.
Could it be, maybe, the quality of the movies that's the real drag here? Star Wars or Batman fanatics might disagree, but this has been a year, and a summer, bereft of that out-of-body-experience movie that has everybody talking and everybody going.
Forty-three percent of those polled by Gallup say better-quality movies would get them to the theater more often. Forty-seven percent of those polled by The AP say movies are "getting worse." A whopping 69 percent say movie stars are negative role models for today's children. The antics of Lindsay Lohan or Russell Crowe or Tom Cruise aren't helping their movies.
Though the polls back this up, you're hard-pressed to hear anybody from the studios admit that the downward slide has anything to do with their churning out movies that any night's channel-surfing will turn up on cable.
Remakes always have been with us. Studios always have recycled successful formulas, plots and occasionally even titles. But making bad new versions of The Longest Yard, The Amityville Horror and War of the Worlds, or creating big-screen takes on ancient TV shows that have been rerun to death (The Honeymooners, Bewitched) is no way to bring back the crowds.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/ae/jump/3249134
