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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Is the motion picture industry still recession proof?
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Mitchell Dvoskin
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1869
From: West Milford, NJ, USA
Registered: Jan 2001
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posted 10-07-2008 09:53 AM
During the Great Depression, movies (in theatres) played a much different role than they do today. Back then, for the price of a cup of coffee, a person could escape the problems of the world and be entertained for hours with a program of shorts, newsreels, cartoons and a double feature. Since there was not television and internet, this was it for affordable entertainment. Today, that is no longer the case. As such, I don't think the motion picture business is recession proof. Already movie going has change from a weekly activity to an occassional event. As money gets tight, theatre's will start hurting along with restaurants and other leasure activities.
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Monte L Fullmer
Film God
Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted 02-15-2009 02:40 AM
On the comments of the discounts: I work in a 6plex discount and with the family and 'date flick' movies that came out late fall, we are are playing them. Thus, we had a stellar weekend of sellouts and major conc sales.
As for the local 1st run complexes: it looks like the young single adults who attend these places aren't worrying about spending the 9 plus bucks to catch a flick, or spend 12 for the 3D versions.
It's the families and older people who really make the issue of high tix prices - yet, they still hit the 'red carpet' to catch that new flick on opening night.
quote: John T. Hendrickson, Jr
..people flocked to theaters that provided a cheap form of entertainment, and an escape (though temporary) from hard times.
And I do believe that this statement still holds to this day: People want to get out of the house, away from their home ENT systems to be entertained...just to do the "escape syndrome"....
And what Robert said about his father holds for me as well: Never was unemployed in the almost 40yrs in this industry. Thus, is that a good thing, or bad thing?
-Monte
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David Stambaugh
Film God
Posts: 4021
From: Eugene, Oregon
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 03-01-2009 08:18 PM
This article ran on the front page of the local newspaper today. It's a wire story with some local slant added.
Americans go to movies seeking silver-screen lining
LOS ANGELES — Hollywood could get used to this recession thing.
While much of the economy is teetering between bust and bailout, the movie industry has been startled by a box-office surge that has little precedent in the modern era. Suddenly it seems as if everyone is going to the movies, with ticket sales this year up 17.5 percent, to $1.7 billion, according to Media by Numbers, a box-office tracking company.
And it is not just because ticket prices are higher. Attendance has also jumped, by nearly 16 percent. If that pace continues through the year, it would amount to the biggest box-office surge in at least two decades.
Americans, for the moment, just want to hide in a very dark place, said Martin Kaplan, the director of the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment and society at the University of Southern California.
“It’s not rocket science,” he said. “People want to forget their troubles, and they want to be with other people.”
Helping feed the surge is the mix of movies, which have been more audience-friendly in recent months as the studios have tried to adjust after the lackluster sales of more somber and serious films.
Some locally-owned Eugene movie houses have been reaping the benefits.
The David Minor theater, Eugene’s newest venue, reports it has had consistent business all year.
“During a recession people may not have income to spend on larger ticket items, this is entertainment and it is enjoyable,” said theater co-owner Ronny Goldfarb.
The theater, named for David Minor, who died in a bicycle accident last June, has used its unique style to carve out a returning audience, he said.
At the Bijou Art Cinemas in Eugene, business has been up as well, said theater manager Scott McGahan. A lot of that could have to do with the presence of two Oscar-winners in “Milk” and “Slumdog Millionaire” on its screens for most of this year.
“In our case, business has definitely been better than the last couple of years, but I don’t know if it would have been if not for those big hit movies,” McGahan said.
Movies offer family fun
As she stood in line at the 18-screen Bridge theater complex in Los Angeles on Thursday to buy weekend tickets for “Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience,” Angel Hernandez was not thinking much about escaping reality. Instead, Hernandez, a Los Angeles parking lot attendant and mother of four young girls, was focused on one very specific reality: her wallet.
Even with the movie carrying a premium price of $15 because of its 3-D effects — children’s tickets typically run $9 at the Bridge — Hernandez saw the experience as a bargain.
“Spending hundreds of dollars to take them to Disneyland is ridiculous right now,” she said. “For $60 and some candy money I can still be a good mom and give them a little fun.”
A lot of parents may have been thinking the same thing Friday, as “Jonas Brothers” sold out more than 800 theaters, according to MovieTickets.com, and was expected to sell a powerful $25 million or more in tickets.
Other movies kept up their blistering sales pace, too, including “Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail,” about a gun-toting grandma. Even “Taken,” a relatively low-cost thriller starring Liam Neeson, is barreling past the $100 million mark this weekend.
Historically speaking, the old saw that movies do well in hard times is not precisely true. The last time Hollywood enjoyed a double-digit jump in attendance was 1989, when the unemployment rate was at a comfortable 5.4 percent and the Gothic tone of that year’s big hit, “Batman,” seemed mostly the stuff of fantasy. That year, the number of moviegoers shot up 16.4 percent, according to Box Office Mojo, a box-office reporting service.
In 1982, theater attendance jumped 10.1 percent to about 1.18 billion (the top seller was “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial”) as unemployment rose sharply past 10 percent. Then admissions fell nearly 12 percent, an unusually sharp drop, in 1985 (the “Back to the Future” year), as the economy picked up — suggesting that theater owners have sometimes found fortunes in times of distress, and distress in good times.
Little research on subject
Academic research on the matter is scant. One often-quoted scholarly study by Michelle Pautz, of Elon University, was published by the journal Issues in Political Economy in 2002. Overall, it said, the portion of the American population that attended movies on a weekly basis dropped from around 65 percent in 1930 to about 10 percent in the 1960s, and pretty much stayed there.
The film industry appears to have had a hand in its recent good luck. Over the last year or two, studios have released movies that are happier, scarier or just less depressing than what came before. After poor results for a spate of serious dramas built around the Middle East (“The Kingdom,” “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition”), Hollywood got back to comedies like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” a review-proof lark about an overstuffed security guard.
“A bunch of movies have come along that don’t make you think too much,” said Marc Abraham, a producer whose next film is a remake of “The Thing.”
Certainly exhibitors are looking for a profit lift in the downturn. A new report from Global Media Intelligence on Friday predicted that the fortunes of movie theater operators like Regal Entertainment and Cinemark Holdings would be “increasingly favorable against a backdrop of highly negative economic news.”
Cinematic quality has little to do with it. The recent crop of Oscar nominees has fared poorly, for the most part, at the box office. Lighter fare has drawn the crowds.
“It would take a very generous person to call these pictures anything other than middle-of-the-road, at best,” said Roger Smith, the executive editor of Global Media Intelligence.
Surge started before Christmas
The box-office surge started just before Christmas with the comedy “Marley & Me,” in which Jennifer Aniston was upstaged by a dog. And it has continued, weekend by weekend, with little sign of let-up, analysts say.
“Watchmen,” a dark superhero film, opens March 6 and is expected to do megawatt business. It is to be followed by “Monsters vs. Aliens,” a 3-D behemoth from DreamWorks Animation that analysts expect to have the biggest March opening ever for a nonsequel.
Movie theaters are already adding 3 a.m. screenings for “Watchmen” next week, and advance sales by online ticket companies like Fandango and MovieTickets.com have been strong.
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