According to The Telegraph, box office tracker Hollywood.com is projecting that Hollywood sold just $10.15 billion worth of tickets, a 4 percent drop from 2010’s revenues. Even worse, only 1.275 billion individual tickets were sold, meaning that movie audiences were at their lowest since 1.26 billion attended the movies in 1995.
Some of that has to be due to quality. Despite a pretty good late-winter's crop of movies, it has been a phenomenally bad year for American film. You can find people grousing about it every week in the comments of Deadline Hollywood's box office report: Too many remakes and sequels and crap ideas, not enough storytelling to warrant leaving the living room in order to pay a lot of money so some asshole can check Facebook on his phone right in front of you every thirty seconds. (Other commenters on Deadline Hollywood claim this slump is the result of a middle-America revolt against liberal Hollywood values. They are special people, with special opinions.) Next year's movies look much more interesting; we'll have to see at this time next year whether movie theaters are about to become the new record- or bookstore.
One thing I can tell you for sure won't get people out to the theater, though: This asinine suggestion from some schlub at Motley Fool.com:
I'm at a movie theater, mowing down some tasty boneless wings that Buffalo Wild Wings provides to the exhibitor every Thursday night. I'm sitting in the row reserved for Facebook meet-ups, along with some of my friends who just happened to be in the area. I'm watching a screening made exclusively for repeat viewers of a pretty loopy Chris Nolan flick. It's OK if someone blurts out the ending, since we've all seen it before.
Then again, we haven't seen this particular version. Folks who bought tickets to previous screenings were given unique ticket codes that they could use to vote online for changes that could be made to the story. We're about to see the alternate version — or at least the one that the majority in this particular theater wanted.
I love it when business people treat movies like they're commodities whose formulas can be tweaked for maximum profitability.