Monday, December 25, 2017

Despite 'Star Wars' Surge, Movie-Going Audiences May Keep Fading

Well, I'm especially not going to see anything affiliated with Harvey Weinstein, and of course I won't see movies featuring any number of leftist stars, like Meryl Streep, George Clooney, or Matt Damon, to name a few.

I did enjoy "Hostiles," so it's not movies per se that are bogus. It's the far left politics for me. For everybody else? Well, who needs the multiplex anymore? Not too many, apparently.

At LAT, "Even with 'Star Wars' surge, moviegoing could hit 22-year low. Blame bad sequels, rising ticket prices and streaming":


Hollywood is celebrating the end of 2017 with astronomical sales from "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," which is on track to soon exceed $1 billion in global ticket sales and eventually become the biggest movie of the year. But that won't be enough to write a happy storyline for the industry.

Although 2017 movie ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada are expected to dip just below last year's record of $11.38 billion, the number of tickets sold is projected to drop 4% to 1.26 billion — the lowest level since 1995, according to preliminary estimates from studio executives.

The falloff in ticket sales can mostly be explained by a handful of movies that flopped, especially during the dreary summer season that posted the worst results in more than two decades. Even such massive hits as "Wonder Woman," "Thor: Ragnarok" and "It" couldn't make up for a lackluster summer lineup populated by rickety franchises ("Alien: Covenant") and poorly reviewed retreads ("The Mummy").

However, the long-term decline in attendance reflects systemic challenges facing the industry. Audiences are spending less time going to the movies and are consuming more entertainment on small screens and through streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon that are spending billions of dollars on original video content.

At the same time, while higher ticket prices have helped to offset attendance declines, they have made consumers pickier about what movies they're willing to go see. And those increasingly discerning consumers turn to social media and Rotten Tomatoes to decide what's worth their time and money.

"You cannot pull a fast one on the audience," said Greg Foster, chief executive of Imax Entertainment. "The tools that are available for consumers to decide how and where to spend entertainment dollars are so vast. Consumers know what works and what doesn't long before the product becomes available."

Challenges at the box office are helping to fuel a wave of media consolidation. Walt Disney Co. this month announced a blockbuster deal to buy entertainment assets from Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion.

Murdoch's surprise decision to sell the bulk of his media empire was at least partly motivated by concerns about the future of the movie business in a world dominated by streaming, analysts said.

Cinema chains also are bulking up to better compete. Regal Entertainment Group, the nation's second-largest theater owner, last month agreed to sell itself to British theater company Cineworld for $3.6 billion.

For studios, the box office has become a land of princes and paupers, with a handful of movies and a couple studios increasingly dominating the business. As of Dec. 17, Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. accounted for 40% of domestic market share. In 2012, the top two studios (Sony and Warner Bros.) only took up 30% of the industry total.

Of the 165 wide-release movies this year, the top 20 claimed 51% of ticket sales in 2017, representing an increase of two percentage points from last year, according to estimates from distributors. Five years ago, the 20 biggest movies accounted for about 40% of annual grosses.

"It's a really binary business between the haves and the have-nots," said Jeff Goldstein, head of domestic distribution for Warner Bros.

Nowhere was that trend clearer than last weekend, when the animated Fox movie "Ferdinand" opened against Disney's "The Last Jedi."

The $111-million kids' film about a fighting-averse bull opened with a pitiful $13 million, due to a lack of audience interest in the story and competition from Pixar's hit computer-animated movie "Coco." By contrast, the new "Star Wars" opened with $220 million — nearly 17 times "Ferdinand's" debut.

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