Is a slow winter a sign of a sea change in moviegoing?
Alongside this week’s series on 2010 specs script sales, I’ve been posting articles analyzing the state of the movie business. Here’s another per Steve Zeitchik at the excellent blog “24 Frames” (LAT):
With just one weekend left in February, only a single 2011 release has topped $75 million — Seth Rogen’s “The Green Hornet” — and even that was considered just a modest success. (Two other movies, “Just Go With It” and “No Strings Attached,” have an outside shot of reaching that number.) It’s not as though there have been been a dearth of star-driven movies, either; in addition to Rogen, this winter’s films feature the likes of Natalie Portman, Justin Bieber and Adam Sandler.
If it were just a slow January and February, you might be able to explain it away as a winter aberration. But overall attendance has been showing weekly year-to-year declines for what is now more than three months, a drop that can hardly be attributed solely to last year’s “Avatar” dominance. And 2010 ended with the lowest attendance level of any year in the previous decade, save for a recession-plagued 2008. The U.S. has added nearly 30 million people since 2000. But the number of people who’ve attended movies has gone down.
Zeitchik goes on to note the “resurgence of grown-up films” as discussed by Patrick Goldstein here. If supposed tried-and-true practices Hollywood has been practicing for several years are starting to falter (witness low B.O.) and quality movies perhaps on the rise, does this signify a trend… or just a blip?
For more of Zeitchik’s article, go here.