2008 Woodie Awards
Viewers demand lower prices
Steve Miller
Issue date: 11/25/05 Section: Tempo
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The headlines were everywhere. Theater attendance is promptly diminishing.
This past summer's movies yielded even less at the box office than last year's films did, and this could mean trouble for the industry. Contrary to what has been reported, this is not a new trend. In fact, this declining trend can be traced as far back when television entered the scene in the late 1940s.
Movie theaters hit their highest sales ever during the Great Depression. When folks needed to give up most of the finer points in life, they sacked everything they could before sacrificing a trip to the cinema. The movies offered a form of escapism that greatly soothed audiences from their otherwise worrying days. Motion pictures served as a medium that couldn't be found elsewhere.
When television came along, people found that same calming feeling in a more convenient way. In an article addressing the window of time between a film's theatrical release and its availability on video, Jay Epstein wrote that since television debuted, "annual attendance, measured by ticket sales, has dropped from $4.68 billion in 1948 to $1.54 billion in 2004, even though the American population nearly doubled during this time period."
Some say it's the quality of the films that discourage customers from spending their hard-earned dollars. Others say it's the cost of the ticket and popcorn and soda that is enticing the consumers. Epstein points out that the quality of the movie has little to do with its box office standings: "the most prolonged decline in Hollywood's history, from 1963 to 1973, in which the weekly audience dropped from 43.5 million to 16 million, was not stemmed by such critically acclaimed films as Mike Nichols' "The Graduate," Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde," David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago," George Lucas' "American Graffiti," George Cukor's "My Fair Lady," and Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner."
This past summer's movies yielded even less at the box office than last year's films did, and this could mean trouble for the industry. Contrary to what has been reported, this is not a new trend. In fact, this declining trend can be traced as far back when television entered the scene in the late 1940s.
Movie theaters hit their highest sales ever during the Great Depression. When folks needed to give up most of the finer points in life, they sacked everything they could before sacrificing a trip to the cinema. The movies offered a form of escapism that greatly soothed audiences from their otherwise worrying days. Motion pictures served as a medium that couldn't be found elsewhere.
When television came along, people found that same calming feeling in a more convenient way. In an article addressing the window of time between a film's theatrical release and its availability on video, Jay Epstein wrote that since television debuted, "annual attendance, measured by ticket sales, has dropped from $4.68 billion in 1948 to $1.54 billion in 2004, even though the American population nearly doubled during this time period."
Some say it's the quality of the films that discourage customers from spending their hard-earned dollars. Others say it's the cost of the ticket and popcorn and soda that is enticing the consumers. Epstein points out that the quality of the movie has little to do with its box office standings: "the most prolonged decline in Hollywood's history, from 1963 to 1973, in which the weekly audience dropped from 43.5 million to 16 million, was not stemmed by such critically acclaimed films as Mike Nichols' "The Graduate," Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde," David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago," George Lucas' "American Graffiti," George Cukor's "My Fair Lady," and Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner."
