The sky is falling!!!
With ledes like this — January 2011 box office: 29% drop from January 2010 — it’s pretty easy to start feeling vaguely apocalyptic about the state of the movie business. From BoxOfficeMojo:
The January box office tallied $754 million, which paled compared to January 2010’s record $1.06 billion gross. The January-to-January drop was the steepest on the books at 29 percent, and the gross was the lowest since 2007.
In terms of estimated attendance, January 2011 posted a 20-year low, and not by some slim margin. The month’s ticket sales were optimistically estimated at 94 million, and one has to go back to 1995 to find another sub-100-million January.
Have people suddenly fallen out of love with movies? Turns out the situation is a little more complicated than ticket sales and box office receipts suggest:
January’s anemic business was a by-product of 2010’s whimpering end, but it was also due to the lowest number of new nationwide releases since 1995: there were only nine, compared to an average of 14 per January over the previous 15 years. When the movies aren’t broadly appealing or aren’t even there, business suffers.
Studios released about a third less movies this January compared to the previous decade and a half. Less product = less revenues.
It used to be January through March were pretty much dumping grounds for movies because the studios figured why waste time and effort on slow movie-going months. Then based a succession of movies released in the first quarter that went on to big box office success, Hollywood began to target every month.
Is this shift to 9 moves in January a sign of retrenchment on the part of the studios? A temporary blip in the number of movies available for release? A reflection of the studios’ thin supply of movies in the can?
For more of the BOM article, go here.