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Title: Worst Box Office In 25 Years: Hollywood’s Problems Are Permanent & Deep
Source:
Breitbart
URL Source: http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollyw ... s-problems-are-permanent-deep/
Published: Sep 2, 2017
Author: John Nolte
Post Date: 2017-09-03 06:17:58 by Tooconservative
Keywords: None
Views: 12946
Comments: 68
If you figure in inflation, those numbers are even worse. For example, in 2012 the average ticket cost $7.96. Today it is almost a full dollar more at $8.89. Yeah, things are that bad and will look even worse on Tuesday. With no apparent faith in their own product, this is the first Labor Day in 25 years where a new title has not been released on more than 1,000 screens. Over this weekend last year, the box office hauled in nearly $130 million. This year will do about a third of that. Summer attendance is at a 25-year low. The summer box office is down a whopping –16% compared to 2016. Can a handful of titles — It, Kingsman 2, Bladerunner 2, Thor 3, Justice League, Star Wars 8 — save an entire year? Doubtful. Pull out of a dive? Maybe. Still, we are talking about only six big titles over four months, which is about on par with last year’s Passengers, Rogue One, Doctor Strange, Fantastic Beasts, Inferno, Sully, and Magnificent Seven. Hollywood has had bad years before and it was not the end of the world. This year feels different, like we have crossed a Rubicon. Investors appear to agree. We begin with the fact that some 15 years ago, the movie business stopped being a growth business. While revenues have increased a bit, admissions have remained stagnant. Those revenues were boosted through premium priced gimmicks like 3D and Imax. One can argue that the worldwide box office has opened up considerably, and while true, entry into that market is an insanely expensive gamble, meaning a CGI’d frachise film, a $250-$350 million entrance fee when you account for production and promotion costs. Moreover, after exhibitors take their cut, a movie has to gross a little more than twice its budget just to break even. So if you spend $250 million and your worldwide gross is $550 million, you are still on the bubble. China, which accounts for the most international growth of late, takes a whopping 75 cents of every box office dollar, and look at how much international revenue comes from a partner that eats up three-quarters of the pie. Yes, the international box office might be up a tick, but I doubt it’s ahead of inflation. Anyway, that is just a summary of the lay of the land. Hollywood’s fundamental problems are much deeper and fall into three categories: product, ideas, and customer service. A quality product, like a tasty burger, is the golden goose that keeps laying the golden egg. Great ideas, like iPads and iPhones, are the golden geese that keep laying those golden eggs. Great customer service — well, you get the idea. And Hollywood’s biggest problem right now, it’s most fundamental problem, is… Product: Outside of low-budget horror, today’s movie biz is only about insanely expensive franchises, which is fine, if you have enough of them. What happened this year and last, unlike any other years I’m aware of, is the death of a whole bunch of golden geese: Straight up bombs include Alien, Transformers, Cars, Smurfs, Resident Evil, Underworld, Wimpy Kid, Xander Cage, Nut Job, Independence Day, Ice Age, Ninja Turtles, Divergent, Huntsman, Alice in Wonderland, Inferno (DaVinci Code), and Jack Reacher. Underperformers include Pirates, Kong/Godzilla, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and X-Men. Add to this an entire genre: the comedy, an area in which Hollywood painted itself into a corner primarily with raunchy titles aimed at teens. Casualties include Baywatch, Snatched, Fist Fight, Rough Night, Ghostbusters, The Boss, Why Him?, Neighbors, Barbershop, Dirty Grandpa, and Zoolander 2. Dead golden geese. Pillars removed. But this happens. Customers grow bored. Things wear out. And this is where ideas are supposed to come into play, because ideas breed more golden geese. Right? Riiiight…? Ideas: The longstanding joke that Hollywood is officially out of ideas is no longer funny. Here is a list of the new ideas, the potential new franchises, that died in the crib: The Mummy, The Emoji Movie, the poorly titled Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, The Dark Tower, Valerian, King Arthur. I do not know of a single new franchise successfully launched this year, and last year there were only three to four: Deadpool, Suicide Squad, Doctor Strange, and Fantastic Beasts. A handful of new franchises compared to somewhere around 20 lost and/or were severely wounded. You do the math. Customer Service: The ideological conformity within Hollywood is not only destroying the greatness that comes from artistic tension, is not only shelving great stories, it is alienating and insulting half the customers. Moreover, going to the movies today is not just an expensive risk when it comes to the quality of the product, but the theaters themselves are terrible at policing the talkers and texters who ruin the experience. Going to the movies used to be a form of escape from the tyranny of everyday life. No more. Around 80% of movies disappoint, the rudeness of others aggravates, and the hyper-politicization of too much of the product and its pitchmen (the actors) drains your ability to remain spellbound. — Hollywood failed to listen to the canary in the coalmine that was the home video business. That pillar collapsed some ten years ago. Instead of looking inwards, instead of realizing that the quality of the product was such that no one wanted to experience it again at home, the studios blamed piracy, video games, and television. Sorry, no. The only problem is that your industry sucks and that it keeps getting suckier. Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here. Even before this catastrophic Labor Day weekend is factored in (more on this below), the domestic 2017 box office is in hideous shape. This year is –6.3% behind 2016 and continues to fall behind 2015, 2013, and 2012.
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#1. To: Tooconservative (#0)
Let me sum it up: 1. No new ideas 2. what they are making is mostly crap. 3. To expensive to go 4. Easier and cheaper to watch what you want at home on a wide screen
Don't forget that many of us, if so inclined, watch streaming videos that might be a whopping two weeks old from the premiers @the box office. Who needs to go to the movies?
Good. Bonappetit, Comrades - ESAD!
I think there's something else. Maybe there isn't, maybe it's just my wife, but I think it's a real leadweight sinker: movie theater shootings by nutjobs and jihadis. My wife used to love to go to the movies. Then the jihadis started shooting up theaters all over the world with their "Allahu Akbar!" bullshit. Now she just does not want to go anymore. She's nervous when we go, and says so. She watches people come in and out. Instead, she has our tech-savvy daughter just stream the movies onto the TV at home, and watches where the only other people present (my daughter and me) are occasionally annoying but not potentially deadly. Now, maybe she's just a one-off, but I doubt it. I think there are people who are deterred from going to sit in a dark kill box because of worldwide terrorism, and that unless the film is really phenomenal, they don't enjoy the experience as much as they used to because they have that in the back of their minds.
Hopefully she stays off the sidewalks too. Some muslim might run her over.
Who needs to go to the movies? I don't, as you said I can watch at home
And ... for FREEEEE!
You amoral liberals always want something for free.
Go armed and take one out.
That average includes children and seniors -- hardly the two groups to make a movie profitable. I just checked movie prices -- $9.99 per person. Plus outrageous prices for popcorn, candy and drinks. A family of four can buy the DVD with enough left over for popcorn, candy and drinks and watch the movie as many times as they want. And they can rewind, pause, and put on subtitles. Plus, there are usually extras such as outakes and "making of" segments. That's assuming, of course, that there are movies good enough to pay money for.
Steven King, my favorite author, wrote The Dark Tower series. It took him eight books to do it. Eight thick books. So what did Hollywood do? They condensed it into one 95 minute movie. 95 minutes wouldn't even do justice to the first book! And the protagonist, Roland Deschain -- the last Gunslinger, was played by a black guy! Why?? The books showed him as a white guy -- kind of a young Clint Eastwood type. Plus, how many gunslingers were black? How is the audience supposed to relate? So it dies in the crib and Hollywood is surprised? Even when Hollywood is given material by quality writers they manage to f**k it up.
Stephen King is a liberal piece of shit.
I could give a flying f**k if he's the anti-Christ. His writing is second to none, and that's why I buy his books.
C'mon, he's very formulaic. I won't bother to characterize him further as a writer due to the many many websites out there that delve into the topic at great length. King's national reputation was more or less made by those deals he cut for an annual movie/miniseries on ABC. And the more he writes about it, the more I think I'd hate Maine.
I'd say the home LED 42+" screen with excellent surround sound with guaranteed front row seating is the primary death knell for the movie business. That and popcorn they sell costing more than the movie ticket, which is too expensive anyway. The theater is great for first dates, and maybe getting out of the house which is important sometimes, but beyond that, it may be going the way of movie rental retailers. Technology is growing and the world is changing with it, at an ever increasing pace. Movie titles and plots may well share the blame. I remember watching "Pacific Rim" and just literally cringing of embarrassment at the stupidity of so many elements of it, and wondering to myself, "is this the best they can do?" I felt like if the likes of that kind of flic could attract funding for creation that I could write some stories that Hollywood would grab up in a heartbeat.
So was Shakespeare, if you think about it. So is every musical on Broadway: a series of disasters followed by a floor show. Pet Semetary was a delightfully dark book. It was like his other horror novels, but the subject matter and style were particularly grim. The darkest thing he ever wrote, though, and one that sticks with you, doesn't have a monster in it at all. It's "Gerald's Game". That is truly one seriously perverse and disturbing read - he has a way. "Forget about 'The Chicken' and 'The Frog'. Come on Gerald, do 'The Dog'!" Dark. Sometimes really funny, in an awful and dark way.
The Asian market is growing. They love stuff like Transformers and Godzilla and giant robots. It's an Asian thing, mostly because Japan's films were widely distributed across Asia decades back. Increasingly, Hollywood is looking at China to make or break its big blockbuster movies. That's why so many sci-fi movies now have a prominent Chinese character, just sort of stuffed into the plot crudely. Like the Chinese girl in Independence Day, Resurgence (or whatever the hell they called that silly thing). It's more important to Hollyweird now to make big money in China and Asia than to appeal to the smaller U.S. audiences that they can satisfy with some streaming movie a month or so down the road. Another problem is that they CGI and green-screen everything to death. Almost everything in many movies is digital fakes where they stretch scenery to their geometry and even clothing onto actors. Then they tween it to death when switching from a live actor to a digital simulacrum for the big CGI action scenes. It all ends up looking like a crappy but high-end video game. And it's no more real. We've seen major decline in the use of live stuntmen, doing real scenes, lending more of an aura of unreality to modern "action" movies. But then, most of the "action" in a modern "action movie" is just pushing pixels around inside a rendering farm composed of thousands of computers.
In New York down by Times Square where we are a lot, that's completely true. Bastards blew me up on 9/11 down at Ground Zero.
Shakespeare's characters were far less repetitive. King recycles the same very limited themes over and over. And his fixation (and boosterism) toward Maine is downright embarrassing. It must gall him that his greatest book and his greatest movie fame is from The Shining where Kubrick rewrote his story to showcase Nickolson's acting. It made King so mad that he got ABC to remake The Shining, using his novel as the only script and faithfully recreating the entire book. The problem was, no one really liked it other than to say it was a faithful recreation of the book. The acting wasn't incompetent but it was far from inspired. That whole Kubrick thing still pisses King off to no end. : )
There's an interesting thought: "favorite author". Your favorite author is Stephen King. I wonder who mine is. I'll admit, years ago I read quite a few of King's novels. I enjoyed his "formula". Never had a bad read from him: Firestarter, Pet Sematary, Gerald's Game. Those stand out in my mind. I think I read everything Tolkien ever wrote, including his published letters, and the 11 or so volumes of his work papers. He was a true genius. But I'll admit that I like J.R.R. Martin's Game of Throne storytelling better. I'll also admit to liking the writing style of whoever wrote Genesis, and St. Mark in particular. There's a French writer of maxims named La Rochefoucauld whose cynicism warms the cockles of my dark heart. But who's my FAVORITE? I think I can actually answer that. Rudyard Kipling, as a poet. Kipling has an insight that he fits into poetic meter that just about perfectly captures my viewpoint on a good number of things. So there. Kipling. Thanks for asking, Mr. White.
I remember seeing the movie "The Shining" and thinking it wasn't really like the book - but that that was ok because a film has to shorten things. We're 7 seasons into Game of Thrones, and it is a great simplification of the story told in five bible-length books - so far! Let's face it, the two actors they had play in that movie: Nicholson and that Olive-Oyl-looking skinny woman with the homely face - they were just absolute masters of that script. "Here's Jonny!" is a perpetually memorable meme. And her ability to convey anxiety and terror in the face of her husband's breakdown was skin-crawlingly real. King should be proud that his novel was adapted so well to the screen, because it was great. Gerald's Game wasn't repetitive. Never heard of a book like that before, and never saw anything like it since. They couldn't turn it into a movie, for obvious reasons. I liked the Maine meme, Maine is like Michigan, a thousand miles closer to civilization.
Yeah, I'll take my Mossy 590, and a bandoleer with 50 more shells. It will be great fun !! Si vis pacem, para bellum Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. Never Pick A Fight With An Old Man He Will Just Shoot You He Can't Afford To Get Hurt "If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went." (Will Rogers)
Hell,I'd start going to the movies again if they would guarantee me a floor show. I'm a point shooter anyhow,so I don't need no stinking sights. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
You have stumbled upon something it would be impossible for me to disagree with. Kipling was,and remains, THE master wordsmith. In the entire history of the world,the only nations that had to build walls to keep their own citizens from leaving were those with leftist governments.
Have you read Neil Stephensons 'Cryptonomicon'? He's my favorite non dead author. That book is just amazing. 'What kind of man gives cigarettes to trees?'
that isn't the issue, I haven't seen anything in the last year I could be bothered with. Hollywood just doesn't get it we don't need to be saturated with CRAP
What I am attempting to get across is that I can watch just about anything through streaming services where I don't pay one thin dime. There is no need to watch much from contemporary Hollywood anyways.
It's over two hours. You just make stuff up.
It's over two hours. You just make stuff up. Make stuff up? Nah. You think it's made up because you don't recognize the truth when it's staring you in the face.
2 HOURS 15 min doesn't equal 95 min.
The Dark Tower Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), the last Gunslinger, is locked in an eternal battle with Walter O'Dim (Matthew McConaughey), also known as the Man in Black. The Gunslinger must prevent the Man in Black from toppling the Dark Tower, the key that holds the universe together. With the fate of worlds at stake, two men collide in the ultimate battle between good and evil. Release date: July 31, 2017 (USA)
https://www.google.com/search? q=it+runtime&oq=it+runtime&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.3770j0j4&client=tablet- android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
What is that gobbledygook? The run time of the movie is 95 minutes. If it's other than that, provide a link.
I agree
It is a link you dumb ass. The runtime isn't 95 minutes you dumb ass. I saw the movie it sucked and it was 2 hrs fifteen minutes. Why do dispute the undisputable? This thread shows that you can never be trusted because you can't even get the length of a stupid movie correct. Oh and I saw it at the drive inn.
We agree. Those who can't even get the length of a stupid movie correct can never be trusted.
Why do you think mister white is so stupid? I know this is the pettiest of petty topics. But it demonstrates mister whites lack of ability to search the internet. To read. To comprehend what he reads. Maybe he is a retard. If you want to see the suck movie you can buy a ticket for the 2 hour 15 minute movie on fandago. I wouldn't recommend it though. https://www.fandango.com/it-2017-199151/movie-overview
It is a deep mystery. Not so much. OTOH, how much traffic would LF get without a misterwhite and a Boxcar Willy? People chewing each other up is a bigger draw at LF and many other forums than any hunger for news stories.
Mister white is a good sport. I'll give him that. I beat up on him pretty bad sometimes. Some days I like mister white and even whillie.
Comments (41 - 68) not displayed.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#2. To: XDMAR, Tooconservative (#1)
Easier and cheaper to watch what you want at home on a wide screen
#3. To: Tooconservative (#0)
#4. To: Tooconservative (#0)
#5. To: Vicomte13 (#4)
My wife used to love to go to the movies. Then the jihadis started shooting up theaters all over the world with their "Allahu Akbar!" bullshit. Now she just does not want to go anymore. She's nervous when we go, and says so. She watches people come in and out.
#6. To: buckeroo (#2)
#7. To: paraclete (#6)
#8. To: buckeroo (#7)
And ... for FREEEEE!
#9. To: A K A Stone (#8)
Keep whining bitch
#10. To: Vicomte13 (#4)
movie theater shootings by nutjobs and jihadis.
#11. To: Tooconservative (#0)
Today it is almost a full dollar more at $8.89.
#12. To: Tooconservative (#0)
"the potential new franchises, that died in the crib ... The Dark Tower"
#13. To: misterwhite (#12)
#14. To: A K A Stone (#13)
Stephen King is a liberal piece of shit.
#15. To: misterwhite (#14)
I could give a flying f**k if he's the anti-Christ. His writing is second to none, and that's why I buy his books.
#16. To: Tooconservative (#0)
#17. To: Tooconservative (#15)
(Edited)
C'mon, he's very formulaic.
#18. To: Pinguinite (#16)
Movie titles and plots may well share the blame. I remember watching "Pacific Rim" and just literally cringing of embarrassment at the stupidity of so many elements of it, and wondering to myself, "is this the best they can do?" I felt like if the likes of that kind of flic could attract funding for creation that I could write some stories that Hollywood would grab up in a heartbeat.
#19. To: A K A Stone (#5)
Hopefully she stays off the sidewalks too. Some muslim might run her over.
#20. To: Vicomte13, misterwhite (#17)
So was Shakespeare, if you think about it.
#21. To: misterwhite (#12)
Steven King, my favorite author, ...
#22. To: Tooconservative (#20)
#23. To: misterwhite (#10)
" Go armed and take one out. "
#24. To: Vicomte13 (#4)
My wife used to love to go to the movies. Then the jihadis started shooting up theaters all over the world with their "Allahu Akbar!" bullshit.
#25. To: Vicomte13 (#21)
(Edited)
But who's my FAVORITE? I think I can actually answer that. Rudyard Kipling, as a poet.
#26. To: Vicomte13 (#21)
#27. To: buckeroo (#7)
nd ... for FREEEEE!
#28. To: paraclete (#27)
#29. To: misterwhite (#12)
#30. To: A K A Stone (#29)
#31. To: misterwhite (#30)
#32. To: A K A Stone (#31)
2017 film
6/10·IMDb
16%·Rotten Tomatoes
Director: Nikolaj Arcel
Running time: 1h 35m
MPAA rating: PG-13
Box office: 88.6 million USD
#33. To: misterwhite (#32)
(Edited)
#34. To: A K A Stone (#33)
https://www.google.com/search? q=it+runtime&oq=it+runtime&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3.3770j0j4&client=tablet- android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
#35. To: buckeroo (#28)
#36. To: misterwhite (#34)
(Edited)
#37. To: A K A Stone (#36)
This thread shows that you can never be trusted because you can't even get the length of a stupid movie correct.
#38. To: misterwhite, tooconservative, nolu chan (#37)
We agree. Those who can't even get the length of a stupid movie correct can never be trusted.
#39. To: A K A Stone (#38)
Why do you think mister white is so stupid?
I know this is the pettiest of petty topics.
#40. To: Tooconservative (#39)
misterwhite and a Boxcar Willy?
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