Here is my latest rant. :) Hollywood's Slump. Boo hoo.
For months I've been silently laughing about how the movie business doesn't get it when it comes to slumping sales. This morning an article in the NY Times connected with me so I thought it time to put pen to paper.
This year I've been reading a lot of headlines about Hollywood complaining that sales are down. I figure perhaps a man at street level can share his point of view. Feel free to comment after.
1. Hollywood doesn't respect the audience. We get product placements that insult our intelligence. We get 20 minute infomercials before each showing. We get trailers that give away all the best parts of up-coming movies. We get stories that are impossible to accept for the sake of stories. We get characters that don't stay in character or show paths of reason to change. We get movie makers making documentaries for political reasons not observational. We get actors playing characters that was obviously only done for star power and ruin the story (Tom Cruise in Legend comes to mind, a more recent example is Catherine Zeta-Jones in Chicago).
2. Bad Movies. Today's movies suck. Enough said. Even Star Wars was toned down for a better movie rating and hurt the story. FYI, lower movie rating like Rated-G means greater possible market share. How about greater movie?
3. Remakes. Stop doing it. I have seen the Bad News Bears in 76 and showed it to my son. We've seen it. Why do yet another remake of a great film that stands the test of time?
4. Greed. Ticket prices are stupid high and from what I hear the studios charge so much to the theaters that the theaters feel compelled to make as much money by charging $4.75 for a soda. Greed on both parts results in a shotgun to the head of would be theater-goers.
5. Bad sequels. I like sequels; when the are good. When they make sense. You know Hollywood is dead out of ideas when they make a sequel to Casablanca; don't laugh that has been the mod us operand of Hollywood decision makers for the past ten years.
6. DVD factor. Let's face it. Hollywood knows if you don't watch it at the theater (and even if you do) they will double up on market sales with DVD sales. What doesn't sell, rents. They could cry the blues that we stay out of theaters because the cost is so high we can just wait for the DVD but that is a ruse.
7. Bad Theaters. I'm not going to a theater to be forced to visit the manager three times to ask him to shut up the kids in the front, the back and all over. Bad parents don't drop off the kids at the movies. It is the ones that drive whom are jerks and if it takes hiring security guards at the door then so be-it. These are modern times and I don't expect to part with hard earned cash to have someones unholy child telling me to shut-up because I asked him to stop barking out obscenities at the screen. Cell phones... bad manners... Etiquette can be enforced and with a little effort theaters can manage that problem. The issue for me is they don't try until a fight breaks out. Then the police are at the theater for a month or so. Keyword, proactive; not reactive.
8. Overall economy. This one is not the theaters problem. If gas is expensive I'm going out less. But hey, don't pay Tom Cruise so much money to be in a movie (I could care less how much you pay him) and lower ticket prices. Where there is a will there is a way.
In short it is everyone's problem but I'm the consumer. Hear me or I'll find entertainment elsewhere.
Here is a copy of the Times Article I linked above in case they kill the link:
Summer Fading, Hollywood Sees Fizzle
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 23 - With the last of the summer blockbusters fading from the multiplex, Hollywood's box office slump has hardened into a reality that is setting the movie industry on edge. The drop in ticket sales from last summer to this summer, the most important moviegoing season, is projected to be 9 percent by Labor Day, and the drop in attendance is expected to be even deeper, 11.5 percent, according to Exhibitor Relations, which tracks the box office.
Multiples theories for the decline abound: a failure of studio marketing, the rising price of gas, the lure of alternate entertainment, even the prevalence of commercials and pesky cellphones inside once-sacrosanct theaters. But many movie executives and industry experts are beginning to conclude that something more fundamental is at work: Too many Hollywood movies these days, they say, just are not good enough.
"Part of this is the fact that the movies may not have lived up to the expectations of the audience, not just in this year, but in years prior," said Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which had some flops this summer, including the science fiction action movie "Stealth" and the romantic comedy "Bewitched." "Audiences have gotten smart to the marketing, and they can smell the good ones from the bad ones at a distance."
Even Robert Shaye, the studio leader behind "The Wedding Crashers," one of the summer's runaway hits, shares the worry about the industry's ability to connect with audiences. "I believe it's a cumulative thing, a seismic evolution of people's habits," said Mr. Shaye, chairman of New Line Cinema.
In previous years, he said, "you could still count on enough people to come whether you failed at entertaining them or not, out of habit, or boredom, or a desire to get out of the house. You had a little bit of backstop."
With competition from video games, hundreds of television channels and DVD's, that's no longer the case, he said. The problem, these studio leaders and other industry experts seemed to say, was not only that a steady diet of formulaic plots, too-familiar special-effects vehicles and remakes of television shows has, over time, left the average moviegoer hungry for better entertainment.
Marc Shmuger, vice chairman of Universal, said Hollywood has been too focused on short-term box office payoff and not focused enough on what he called "the most elemental factor of all" - the satisfaction of the moviegoing experience.
"It wasn't like the last crop of summer movies were that much better than this summer," said Mr. Shmuger, whose studio's recent releases included the success "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and several disappointments, including "Cinderella Man,""The Perfect Man" and "Kicking and Screaming." "This summer has been as deadening as it has been exciting, and there's a cumulative wearing down effect. We're beginning to witness the results of that. People are just beginning to wake up that what used to pass as summer excitement isn't that exciting, or that entertaining. This is vividly clear in terms of the other choices that consumers have."
The blockbuster hits of last summer, including "Spider-Man 2,""Shrek 2" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," performed more or less on the same level as this year's hits, including "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith,""Batman Begins" and "War of the Worlds." But too many big-budget movies, including "The Island" and "Stealth," flopped entirely, while other films, from "Bad News Bears" to "Herbie: Fully Loaded" to "The Great Raid," were disappointing.
The box office numbers have led to intense, broad-ranging conversations across Hollywood about the implications. Many studios have commissioned market research to investigate the causes of moviegoing behavior - or the lack thereof. At New Line, executives have been talking about the "sameness of everything" on movie schedules, one executive said. At 20th Century Fox this week, a half-dozen top executives held an impromptu brainstorming session at the commissary with a reporter, debating the effects of gas prices and marketing missteps.
Tom Rothman, co-chairman of 20th Century Fox, was one of the few to see no negative trend in the current numbers. "Everybody keeps saying it's the worst of times; it seems fine to me," said Mr. Rothman, whose studio has had some big-budget successes this summer, with "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "The Fantastic Four." He noted, for example, that the advent of DVD's has expanded the overall revenues of the movie industry. "For us the business is healthy, but it requires management," Mr. Rothman said.
Just about everywhere else, though, the concern is palpable - and understandable, not only because of the performance of this summer's movies, but also because a decline is discernible over time: overall movie attendance, a figure not affected by inflation, has slid to below where it stood in mid-August 2001. DVD sales, while still robust, are no longer rising exponentially, and some analysts say that a poor box office performance this summer will lead to poor DVD sales this winter.
With billions of dollars at stake, nerves are growing understandably frayed. Last week, John Fithian, the president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, accused Robert A. Iger , the incoming chief executive of Walt Disney, of leveling a "death threat" at theater owners for having suggested that the lesson to be drawn from the slump is that moviegoers want films to be accessible in theaters and on DVD simultaneously.
"The structure of the industry is sound," said Mr. Fithian, who believes in maintaining a distance between the theatrical release and the DVD. "We just need a few more good movies."
Mr. Iger had observed that studios ignored consumers at their peril. "We can't allow tradition to stand in the way of where the consumer can go, or wants to go," he told analysts this month, warning that "the music industry learned this the hard way."
Mr. Iger's conclusion - that consumers want the choice of seeing movies in their homes at the same time as in the theater - is being reached by others in the industry as well. But it remains contentious, resisted not only by the owners of theater chains. Mr. Lynton of Sony was adamant that the theatrical experience should be protected, while Mr. Shaye said he was still "on the fence" on the subject.
Warren Lieberfarb, a former Warner Brothers executive who was a main advocate of the DVD in the early 90's, warned that going to the movies had become too expensive over all, given the excellent quality of home theater. "It's not just the DVD. It's not just the DVD window," he said. "It's the flat-panel television and the sound system, with the DVD option, that has radically changed the quality of the in-home experience. The home theater has arrived." As a result, he said, "you have to change the business model of the movie business."
With the task so large, and so very complex, Hollywood is still grappling with how to broach solutions.
Mr. Lynton said he would focus on making "only movies we hope will be really good." At Fox, executives said they are looking to limit marketing costs. At Universal, Mr. Shmuger said he intends to reassert "time and care and passion" in movie production. Some of his own summer movies, he conceded, should never have been made.
He declined to name them.
