Alan Lebetkin

Hollywood made record box office revenue this summer but had the lowest attendance since 2005. If I remember correctly that was the year of the so-called “slump”.  The higher take comes from inflated ticket prices for now ubiquitous 3-D and IMAX screenings.  Unfortunately, the quality of movies just sucks and no one’s interested in paying more for Marmaduke 3-D.

I’ve noticed a distinct slide in movie quality over the last 5 years too.  While I used to spend entire weekends catching up on new releases, these days I’m barely motivated to leave the house.  Shrek Ever After isn’t worth the 25 cents of gas I’d spend driving to see it.  It’s disappointing that the Hollywood business model boils down to this:

Pay more, get less!

This should be economics 101 for the studios.  There are quality scripts out there.  I know this because I used to read them for internships and 20% of the stuff out there wasn’t all that bad.  A small percentage of it was actually pretty great.  That may seem like a small number but there’s thousands and thousands of scripts, so there’s more than enough decent material to fill up a year’s worth of releases.  The studios seem to be eschewing quality original material to invest in known franchises however.  These days, only a proven director like Chris Nolan can get good original material greenlit, and in a way that’s sticking to a franchise (Chris Nolan being the “franchise”).

The box office will go in one of two ways from here: 1) Same bad movies, ticket prices come down.  As 3-D becomes less of a novelty audiences will not want to pay more for the technology and start to shrink.  Eventually audiences bottom out and Hollywood adjusts ticket prices to bring people in again.  Audiences will return, but not enough to sustain the industry in the long-term.  Hollywood hits a financial crisis.

2) Better movies, ticket prices come down.  3-D is poised to go widespread at this point and no matter what the cost will have to come down.  If Hollywood isn’t there to meet audiences with better movies, the concept of spending an evening at the movies won’t return.  But deliver people movies they’d want to see, and suddenly you’re bringing in even those consumers who were avoiding 3-D because of the higher ticket prices.

There’s a lot more too it of course.  It wouldn’t hurt to expand audiences and release tent pole movies that aren’t all animated fart jokes for kidz.  New media and internet distribution models are something of a question mark and will probably end up factoring in.  But at the end of the summer it all boils down to one thing: make better movies.