“Lessons of the Summer Box Office”
Since summer typically generates 40% or more of overall domestic theatrical box office, you can bet that there will be a ton of analysis coming down the pike re summer 2010. Here is an initial one from the NYT:
LOS ANGELES — Christopher Nolan proved there is always room at the multiplex, even in swimsuit season, for a smart, original story. Will Ferrell bounced back. Michael Cera fell flat. Animation was the №1 genre. Sorry, “Sex and the City” ladies: It’s over.
Hollywood’s summer may have been tepid — movie theater attendance was the lowest in over a decade — but the big-budget, big-risk stretch delivered an unusually robust array of tea leaves for studios to read as they make decisions for the seasons ahead.
First, the numbers. Attendance from the first weekend in May through Labor Day is projected to total about 552 million, the lowest tally since 1997, when 540 million people turned up in the same period, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box office data. Revenue for the period — which typically accounts for 40 percent of the industry’s annual ticket sales — totaled $4.35 billion, a 2 percent increase from last year.
Sharply higher prices for tickets across the board, but especially for 3-D presentations, drove the increase. The worry, as seen in poor results for recent 3-D releases like “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” is that theater chains and studios have overreached on pricing. “We suspect some consumers are choosing 2-D movies solely to reduce the cost of their moviegoing experience,” wrote Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, in an Aug. 23 research note.
With the 3D phenomenon flattening out and DVD sales continuing to fall, one would think that the Hollywood studios would be extremely concerned over that drop in ticket sales, lowest in 13 years. More evidence to support this?
Oh, boy. Let’s see on June 2nd, we had this article from THR: “Are moviegoers tiring of sequels”?
Hollywood still hopes to shake off early symptoms, but there is spreading concern that the summer boxoffice will be plagued by a nasty case of sequelitis.
Conditions are ripe: Studios have planted 11 sequels or franchise reboots in the fertile May-August span, up from nine last summer and seven from the 2008 season. But those opened so far have underwhelmed, with seasonal boxoffice off by a double-digit margin and studio executives beginning to feel woozy.
On June 3rd, there was this article asserting that the problem with the sucky summer box office was not enough sequels.
Summer 2010 always looked soft from a distance. Why? Because of a lack of sequels [emphasis added]. No Spider-Man, Batman, Transformers, Bourne, or Harry Potter.
Later that week, Patrick Goldstein weighed in with this:
So why the cold shoulder from audiences? This is the time of year when all we hear about are the remakes and sequels and rebooted franchises coming off the studio assembly lines. But the real problem with this summer’s box office is that it hasn’t spawned a really good original movie, since it’s the original movies — like last year’s “The Hangover,” “Up” and “The Proposal” — that bring a broader swath of eager new moviegoers into the theaters [emphasis added]. In fact, the movies from the first week of June in 2009 and 2008 that would’ve finished ahead of “Shrek” were all original films — “Up” and “The Hangover” from 2009, “Kung Fu Panda” and “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” from 2008.
Perhaps Goldstein is right as this shockingly hopeful article from the Vulture suggests:
Conventional wisdom in Hollywood of late has said that you should stick to familiar brands when making movies. It could be a sequel or an adaptation of an old TV show, board game, toy, or crumpled candy wrapper, just as long as people already know it. So how’s that working out? In a summer season where only three out of the fourteen major releases so far have come from a new idea, attendance is down 13.3 percent from last season. Even with The Karate Kid’s surprise bounty, box-office revenue is down 7.5 percent, according to the National Association of Theater Owners … and that is skewed more by 3-D gouging than anything else: Since the summer of 2009, ticket prices have actually gone up 8 percent. That’s why studio execs at Warner Bros., Paramount/DreamWorks, and Universal are now madly pinging agents and managers with an uncharacteristic, desperate, and welcome request: Send us your fresh material!
“We’re on a lot of calls with people at the highest level [of production], and they’re just nervous,” one agent tells Vulture. “They’ve been telling us, ‘We have our movies for next year, but attendance is down, so, guys, you know what? Get us the original material. We need some original shit, because now our bosses are on us.’” It’s no wonder panic is in the air, considering how moviegoers are rebelling. “People are feeling marketed to, as opposed to catered to,” says JC Spink, a partner in the management and production company Benderspink and one of the executive producers of last summer’s surprise original hit, The Hangover. “I think we’ve all gone a little bit overboard as an industry. There hasn’t been room for original material for a little while now. It’s a shame, because I don’t think it’s what anyone [who works in the business] came out here for.”
“We need some original shit.” After a summer when only a handful of sequels performed well and the biggest hits were the original movies Inception and Despicable Me, I think that about sums things up — and provides some hope, albeit in a scatological way — for anyone writing a spec script.