Slump?

I have to respectfully disagree. The movies this summer were, by and large, awful. I’m not talking about box-office, I’m talking about quality and entertainment value. For die-hard moviegoers like myself and my family, this summer was a real disappointment.

It’s not quality — it’s repetitiveness.

I took my teenage son to one of the early-summer blockbusters, and we saw about eight trailers with things blowing up, and they looked mind-numbingly similar, one to the next. I asked him which looked good, and he said that they all looked the same to him, too.

Driven by the necessity of big foreign box office, the studios have fallen into a paint-by-numbers trap: interchangeable genre movies, interchangeable superhero movies, interchangeable remakes of old movies and TV shows which weren’t great the first time but have built-in brand awareness, and if anything original does happen to slip through and work… then let’s do it again, at least twice.

I for one wouldn’t mind them thinking that things are broken.

Hey there, first time poster.

I kind of agree with Howard. We are seeing a lot of the same movies lately, therefore with no change in improvement of quality, the movies seem pretty mediocre. Medicrity = Bad.

However there’s also rising ticket prices, and more “commercials” before the show. Essentially, we’re paying more for the same stuff, and we become really annoyed before the show starts.

We just need some one to break the mold.

The core repeat audience for movies is the 16-24 male and though a 6% drop isn’t that much to worry about, who knows? This might be the beginning of a trend.

It’s like comic books. Once upon a dime, they cost a dime/quarter/whatever, and everybody in this demographic read them. Now they cost, what, a $1.50, and Marvel and DC are fighting over are a rapidly shrinking sliver of what the market used to be. If teenage males find a more cost efficent use of their screwing-around time (video games, DVDs, heavy drinking), who’s going to fill those multiplexes come June?

I respectfully disagree as well, I have also thought that there seemed to be less risk-taking and, I don’t know, surprise maybe, in mainstream films - it sometimes feels like all the movies are put together using the same dress pattern and at times it gets boring. Even some of the bigger independent films feel that way.

Now whether or not there is or was a box office slump or what have you, in terms of numbers I honestly don’t know how it works. It is true that there has always been and will always be bad movies. I simply think that we are getting more of them this year than is the norm.

There will also always be good films that challenge and entertain. I simply feel that this year so far there are less of them than say, ten years ago.

What’s the best film anyone’s seen thus far this year? The only memorable ones I can think of for myself is THE ARISTOCRATS and perhaps CRASH (now a rental). I also enjoyed HUSTLE & FLOW and plan on seeing A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE in theatres. I also have SERENITY on my list.

I don’t even remember most of the movies released thus far this year. I was disappointed with War of the Worlds, Flightplan and quite a few other films. I think I would have enjoyed THE FORTY-YEAR OLD VIRGIN had there not been a screaming baby in the audience, one that the usher didn’t do anything about and who cried through the whole screening of the rated R movie.

Whenever I weigh the risk of seeing a film, I also consider that in four months netflix will send it to my home for a quarter of the cost and risk, and often the DVD will include features and bonuses not available in the theatre, including a directors cut that is usually more interesting than the cut in theatres. Usually, not always.

Just my opinion, of course. Isn’t it interesting that the last few years has seen a boom in cable original programming, stories that often surprise and defy expections of the viewer?

Without this seeming like a shameful and rather tasteless plug this is exactly what I’ve been talking about my blog for a while now. Where is the excitement about the films that we used to have. My conclusion is upbeat though. New distribution methods will mean movies WILL HAVE to get better. Marketing will no longer work. As blogs etc increase in power a dodgy movie will be death. So don’t make them. The temporary fix by Hollywood has been to focus on launch day before word of mouth hits the street. But I don’t know for how much longer that will work when most people don’t go to the cinema anymore. They wait for DVD / PPV etc.

This is just a guess — I could look it up but it’s more fun this way — that Troy did better than Sideways. I’m thinking two hundred plus worldwide for the former piece of crap and maybe seventy-five for the latter. Do The number crunchers in Tokyo really care about wit and originality? I doubt they even appreciated the irony of Lost in Translation. On the plus side, both you and Mr. August have an interesting knack for doing quality work that actually makes money. We should all be so lucky. At this point I would re-write Troy III: The Revenge starring Jared Padelecki and call myself a bright, shining success. No biz does deluded like show biz.

Actually, I believe Lost In Translation was pretty popular in Japan (I was there a couple times when it was running) though I don’t know if the numbers compare with, say, Armageddon or any of that kind. But Japanese folks liked it, including my special girl, who is Japanese.

I was told something interesting recently, and that’s that Constantine wasn’t considered a hit here because it only made something like 85 million domestic, but it’s a huge hit everyone where else, pulling in around 275 million in all the other countries combined. (an aside, these are unverified numbers, just estimates). So is it a hit? Was it a success?

not enough people wanted to spend a weekend watching really bad films

At this point, it’s hard to support your view statistically, Craig (and John). If one looks at the nominal box office growth over the past twenty years, they find the following:

Average growth rate: 5.06% Standard Deviation in growth: 4.62%

(from Box Office Mojo)

Since the skew of the distribution is basically normal (less than .1), one can easily make observations about this year compared to history. Specifically, assuming the 6% drop in box office holds, you can say with a 99.16% certainty (a t-statistic of -2.39) that there is something fundamentally abnormal about this season.

From there, interpretations are open (poor quality of movies, abundance of alternative sources of entertainment, etc.), but the basic premise of systemic problem is difficult to reject.

Lee

The movie business is only fine if you consider DVD sales as part of the movie business — then it is doing great.

But we’re in the midst of a slow, inevitable shift in which movie theaters become less and less necessary, and are pricing themselves out of most people’s weekly consideration.

I ramble about more of this on my blog, so I won’t clog up any more of yours…

craig

hmm. i’ve never sensed as much dissatisfaction and cynicism regarding the movies as now. i, myself, have pretty much lost interest. to me, movies seem consistently ‘not as good’. i really don’t care much anymore and see most pictures on disc. at current rate, i’m seeing about 3 movies a year at the theater

it’s not objective, i know, but i think there is in fact something wrong. i don’t think this slide will end. i think the heyday is over. i suppose only time will tell

zilla

Ugh, yes. I remember the third or fourth time I saw an article in the New York Times about the “box office slump,” I started thinking, “Geesh, even if there is a bit of a slump, and the 4-6% these stories are quoting (if it’s true) isn’t really a big deal, is it really that big news that they have to repeat it after every slightly-off weekend?”

I think the best point August makes is that a single hit in late summer could have erased the overall difference. I don’t think one summer’s worth of relatively low grosses is enough to leap to any conclusions.

And amidst all the statistical comparisons, nobody seems to be taking inflation and ticket price increases into account. Shouldn’t we be focusing on the number of tickets sold, not the number of dollars earned? Yes, I do know the reason why we don’t — it benefits the industry to be able to constantly say that grosses are at an all-time high, even if an inflation-adjusted analysis would show no change or even a loss, blah blah blah economics-cakes.

P.S. Craig, any idea why the “Preview” page when posting a comment seems to be bereft of CSS styling? It’s just plain black-and-white. And the actual comment preview itself doesn’t handle new lines properly; it just runs everything together in one big blah.

Matt:

You know, it’s always been that way. I should ask my web designer. Fact is that I never use comment preview, so it’s not been on my radar.

I’ll look into it.

Matt,

Even adjusting for inflation, or considering the number of tickets sold, this is a statistically anomalous year at the box office. It’s improbable to argue otherwise.

One thing to consider, however, is the shrinking fraction box office revenue plays in the overall “movie business.” Specifically, box office revenue has gone from 53% of Major Studio World Wide Revenues, to only 18% in 2003 (taken from The Big Picture by Epstein). Keep in mind that Major Studio total revenues have grown quite healthily over this period. Thus, the argument could be made we’re only witnessing a shift in viewing behavior, and the Studio business is still healthy.

But for the Exhibitor, there is something deeply wrong, and it shouldn’t be surprising they would fall back upon “product quality” arguments. The merit of such assertions, however, are difficult to establish.

Lee

That should read, “53% of Major Studio World Wide Revenues in 1980, to…”

Lee

A friend of mine directed me to read a book called “Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter” by Steve Johnson. One thing posited in the book is that films suffer at the hand of other media. Why? Because over the last 25 years our brains have been conditioned to ‘multithreading’ and a larger number of character and story arcs. That’s why TV shows which are more complex are generally seen as being ‘richer’ and more satisfying than in the past, because more can be gained on multiple viewings and it involves our brains more actively. Films, on the other hand, have a difficult time modeling this since the time granted for a film is limited. A film like “Lord of the Rings” is highly successful because of, not in spite of the number of characters and storylines. Maybe this explains why we have come to view a lot of recent films as being ‘stupid’ or ‘overly simplistic’ — they are when compared to a lot of the other entertainment we injest.

Anyway, I found the theory interesting…

I don’t think that word-of-mouth from web sites and blogs has any more effect on box office than reviews do (negligible).

“Serenity” was, according to Technorati, the most mentioned movie on blogs last week, plus it has a 79% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, yet its per theatre average was only $300 more than “Flightplan” which has a 37% percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Go figure!

I thought “Flightplan” would crash in its opening weekend after reading the reviews, yet it’s the #1 movie for the second straight weekend and the audience word-of-mouth was good enough so that business was down only 40% compared to the opening weekend.

Maybe the audiences are getting what they deserve?

Lee,

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I agree that it qualifies as a statistical anomaly — box office revenues (and tickets sold) are both inarguably down over last year. The cause of said drop, well, I have no idea what it is — but I do think that the news outlets that keep running the story as if it’s the Apocalypse are being a bit thick-headed.

I’ve read numerous articles in the last couple of years pointing out that the studios now make more money from DVD sales of movies than they do from box office. The box office is seen as advertising for the DVD release, and the studios aren’t going to stop making movies any time soon. (Despite the inane anti-piracy warning ads. I already paid for the movie, why are you telling me not to steal it?)

As far as Serenity goes… I could toss out any number of facile reasons for Flightplan having only a slightly lower PSA than Serenity, despite its vastly inferior reviews. Science fiction flicks outside of Star Wars are only for geeks; no big-name stars in Serenity; not as many advertising bucks for Serenity, etc.

An Unfinished Life was a superb drama, and Oliver Twist was a great classic remake. Lord of the Gun had a first-person unique take, nice script too. A History of Violence held you on. Corpse Bride was stellar. Emily Rose was handled perfectly. In Her Shoes, a sleeper hit. The Squid and the Whale, family drama as a work of art. Two For The Money, a classic Pacino overdramatic vehicle, but D.J. Caruso landed it softly. Thumbs up by me. Wallace & Gromit, need you say more? The Constant Gardener was a good political football story. Tons of good out there if you hunt, and that’s just the past 2 weeks or so, to say nothing of a slew of great limiteds. And I liked Flightplan. :) Serenity felt like it was a FOX TV series opener, which indirectly kinda was. But good Sci-Fi, weak plot, but I didn’t care, fun ride during. Elizabethtown and Domino this Friday and then Narnia upcoming… Slump? Hardly. If this is a slump I want more and more of it.

I am looking at the ytd stat’s, and “slump” is the wrong word, minor adjustment, perhaps, if even that, but I mark it down to just an easy-kick around story, yelling ‘fire’ about the theaters. The stat’s are so close, that I am hard pressed to find any sort of trend, as one or two bigger blockbusters would throw it all off. If in a real slump, it wouldn’t be tracking so close, everyone would know it and feel it, not just these vague newspaper stories, it would be more the blood in the streets style. And then the various interpretations are mere witchdoctoring random guessing. Pick any pet cause, marry that to the analysis, expand at length. Just no context here and not really enough stat’s to hook onto unless you play 20 year games, which really says nothing, as so many other variables.

Christopher,

The stats are not close. They’re about as compelling as one can possibly find.

Matt,

The real story - as far as I can glean - is what you offer:

< blockquote > The box office is seen as advertising for the DVD release… < /blockquote >

It’s interesting to consider Craig’s background against this view.

Lee

Christopher — A lot of those movies haven’t even come out yet (and Elizabeth and Domino aren’t for a week and a half — are you time traveling?), so the jury is still out on them. And though you may have liked “An Unfinished Life”, it doesn’t seem to have clicked with critics or audiences otherwise.

Fall is usually the time when all the older audience movies do come out, though. Finally.

Well, I watch lotta (not all) the Fridays on Tuesdays, but I did say ‘this Friday’ per Domino and Elizabethtown, wasn’t as lucky on those. And I forgot one, ‘The Greatest Game Ever Played’ was a masterstroke, if Disney predictable, but the feel good ‘warms-the-heart’ style. And an oldie but goodie, ‘Broken Flowers’ was quite compelling, low-key, but yet profound, with a nice snappy ending. And on tiptoes for ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’, ‘Sin City 2’, ‘V for Vendetta’ and Christopher Guest’s new mockumentary ‘For Your Consideration’, and then the kiddie ones: ‘Smurfs’, ‘Cars’ and ‘Curious George’. My point being, I am not doom and gloom. This was a great summer and more great stuff to come. Even given ‘The Cave’, ‘Venom’, ‘Cry Wolf’ and ‘Into the Blue’, but you knew that going in, popcorn time. I see nearly 250 in-developments that I wanta see, yes even ‘The Wonder Twins’ and ‘The Lost Girls’. I don’t think I will be able to stomach ‘Santa Clause 3’ tho. ;)

Compelling as one can find? What am I missing then? I don’t see that at all. To me it just looks, normal ebb and flow. One year domestic down, international up, and the next all switcheroo. It all just looks Florida shark hysteria to me.

It broke out to wider press. :)

The Hollywood crisis that isn�t Everyone panic - that�s an order!

http://www.theregister.com/2005/10/04/hollywoodcrisisno_crisis/

Barely a week has gone by without reports of Hollywood�s great box office slump of 2005. So our thanks go to screenwriter John August for pointing out that on closer examination, the �slump� is as elusive as missing Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Movies are like children, verily - none of them remain long under your control once they are released. They are open to endless interpretation - and that is just looking at it from the director’s point of view. The screenwriter has it really bad; having no control whatsoever upon what his words will inspire everyone else to do with them!
From the filmgoer’s perspective, nowadays substance is simply NOT to be expected - it comes so infrequently, you better go in there expecting your money’s worth in terms of the number of times you will experience sensory overload thanks to CGI, FX, zany sounds and stupendous filmscores… THAT is truly as good as it gets anymore, folks!

Hollywood is idea-bankrupt - thankfully, there is an endless supply (or so it seems) of ideas to be exploited and adapted into the Seventh Art medium… Expect lots and lots of novels, comic-books, video games, old TV shows, children’s books and assorted properties to be “reinvented” (or repackaged?) as feature films - and in a theater near you very, very soon! :)

The greatest hits effect?
Maybe thinking about movies past and present is like thinking about songs on the radio past and present. The stations that carry older songs (say songs from the 80’s) seem to be so much better sounding that the ones carrying the newest songs being made today. But, of couse, that’s because the older song stations only play the GOOD songs from the 80s, they skip the crappy ones that everyone’s forgotten. Whereas the station with the latest songs plays everything, good and bad. When you talk about movies of the past, you have to include all the bad and mediocre ones that are so easy to forget to include…

Christopher offers:

To me it just looks, normal ebb and flow.

Which is why I offered a statistical view: based on the last twenty years of box office data, the “normal ebb and flow” view has a 0.84% probability of being correct. The converse, of course, is the drop is something other than the “normal ebb and flow.”

Or to put it another way: Vegas was built on differences in perception like these.

Lee

There probably has been a slight decline in box office tickets but this mirrors the decline in quality films over summer. I dragged myself to see Charlie and Chocolate factory a remake and that was the only film that stood out all summer. I mean we had the likes of Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava girl!! LOL And 40 Year Old virgin. I mean come on…. are ideas really wearing that thin?!

I agree with Howard. I want the studios to believe in the slump. Whether the hysteria’s warranted or not—and it probably isn’t—movies were awful this year. I’m here looking at IMDb, and I think there’ve been only three or four movies I thought were really something. Compared to last year, that’s abysmal.

And even though I’m 100 percent sure I’ll love Grizzly Man and History of Violence, some jackass has decided not to show either of them in my town. But hey, Into the Blue’s playing a dozen times a day.

I mean we had the likes of Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava girl!! LOL And 40 Year Old virgin. I mean come on�. are ideas really wearing that thin?!

Your argument might be stronger if you hadn’t claimed that The 40-Year-Old Virgin was a “thin idea” and, by implication, a bad movie and waste of celluloid. But it’s so far grossed more than four times its production budget ($101m vs. $26m), and has had generally excellent reviews (84%/85% on Rotten Tomatoes, 73 on Metacritic).

based on the last twenty years of box office data

That’s where I take leave. But maybe you are correct, it’s alot less than 50 years ago, too. The greater the time expanse, the more likely you are to find some supposed correlation. Analysts and stockpickers do that all the time, predictions made far into the future, concerning past statistical data that is technically irrelevant and can’t really be isolated. It’s a truly a crisis if there are signs that studios can’t be profitable anymore, hence no more theatrical releases.

One of the difficulties in offering a statistical view, is that it’s arcane and obtuse to most. It seems like we’re just not wired to think this way; we like certainties. [for those who care, there’s a beautiful book, FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS by Nassim Taleb, which addresses this topic]

In this case, Christopher, I could have used a sample of 10, 15, 25, or 30 years, but the conclusion wouldn’t differ, only the degree of certainty in rejecting the view that what we’re seeing is the normal business cycle at the box office. Now that’s significant for two reasons:

1) If next year’s box office rebounds, then it will be hard to say the dip wasn’t due to poor product quality. There are four variables in the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, and place of distribution), and since the latter three are likely to remain (essentially) unchanged for ‘06, that only leaves one element of the markeing mix to “blame.”

2) If next year continues to lose ground, then all four marketing variables are still in play as causal factors for the box office dip.

3) Both 1 & 2 are not predictions. They are diagnosis points, or, a way of understanding what the future might mean, and if you’re an movie business executive, where you’d like to focus your attention.

Also note there is a difference between understanding box office health, and movie business health. They are very different animals, and has been pointed out, box office health is becoming decreasingly important to movie business revenues. Again, Epstein’s book is a great primer.

Lee

Well I don’t mean to ‘tit for tat’, I think I will have to agree to disagree, Vegas or not. :) There’s always a cycle when the pundits (and John Fithian) catcall Hollywood as dead. But some final thoughts…

1) You can’t make the connection per Box Office revenue and ‘product quality’, as too many other variables. And ‘quality’ itself is a very subjective thing. The highjinks parody Comedy type and the epic ‘tour-de-force’ sweeping drama fan, will never see eye to eye. Action fans won’t exactly view the Oscar-winning character-driven family-trauma movie as ‘quality’. Someone may adore Johnny Depp and want to see everything he is in, others might dislike and avoid, both irrespective of ‘quality’. How exactly do we define ‘quality’ and who gets to decide? And what of quality but the wrong tone? ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ was quality, but it failed as it got the on the wrong political coin flip, as being the Bin Laden view of history, a hopelessly naive compromise, at best. Not taking sides, just saying that was the perception. And perception is truth, even if not.

2) Just those four? What impact did two major hurricanes have? What impact does the price of gasoline have? Whole slew of factorings that go well-beyond your MBA closed-matrix. And people are forgetting about the social aspect of movie going, it’s not just about the product, price, location or marketing. That being said, sure some doozers this year, even Amy Pascal fessing up. But some great ones in the mix too. Bombs, hits, sleepers, blockbusters, same ole, same ole. People are fickle.

3) Diagnosis points, otherwise known (in stockbroker circles) as ‘voodoo’ or a ‘crystal ball’. This is not a science. Economics is just human behavior, and although worthy of study, predictable it is not. I am no stranger to the world of statistics, but past performance is not always indicative of future results, as they say. And what of September? Emily Rose, Corpse Bride and Flightplan pushed it ABOVE 2004. And it’s not over yet, Wallace and Gromit, Goblet of Fire, Narnia, The Producers, King Kong all upcoming.

The box office is not overall macro ‘movie industry’, yes, on that I agree. However I think that box office still plays a very important vital role, even in the DVD era. You need the box office and word-of-mouth splash to carry over into the rental and sales charts, picking up the residuals. Even an accelerated DVD cycle, needs sustainment and more marketing to keep the title fresh in people’s minds. Or you could just go Robert Iger, DVDing and BOing at same time, kiss of death, imho.

Ending in agreement however, as I worship Epstein�s book. :)

PS - Humor Time: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/41239