A Big Fat Box Office Increase

....Yes, "Spider-Man" led the 2002 box office, its $404 million gross nearly a third larger than the $310 million earned by second-place "Star Wars: Episode 2 — Attack of the Clones." And yes, whether the year's final tally turns out to be $9.2 billion or only $9.1 billion, it is a significant increase that comes at a time when almost all other forms of popular entertainment are suffering shrinking revenues and dwindling audiences.

But it does not mean, as some may interpret it, that movies are more central to American life than ever.

"It's a totally different world, and people have a lot of options other than movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a Los Angeles-based company that monitors box-office results. "In a sense it's intriguing that as relatively old-fashioned a medium as movies are still one of the top entertainment choices for Americans."

In 1929, when the annual box office was $720 million, the average person in the United States (including everyone, infants and all) went to the movies 40 times a year. There were 4.9 billion tickets sold that year.

This year an estimated 1.5 billion tickets were sold, the highest since 1.8 billion in 1959. But because of population growth, the average person saw only about 5 movies this year, compared with 10 in 1959.

Even this is a little misleading, because the 2002 audience is actually made up of a small core of people — mostly under the age of 25 — who go to the movies regularly, and a smaller group that goes only once or twice in a year.

"The situation is that 20 percent of the audience represents 80 percent of the box office," said Robert Bucksbaum, president of ReelSource, a company that monitors the box office. "So you have a lot of movies that are geared towards that same audience."

Even the "Spider-Man" millions seem a tad less impressive when measured against blockbusters from years past, once the grosses are adjusted for inflation.

The $159 million that "The Sound of Music" made in 1965 becomes, in today's dollars, an eye-popping $905 million. The $260 million that "Jaws" earned after its 1975 release is suddenly $866 million.

And the $323 million that "Star Wars" made in its initial round of releases in 1977, followed by an additional $138 million for a 1997 rerelease, becomes $1.1 billion in today's dollars. Take that, web-slinger.

"The movie business is all about hype and buzz," said David Davis, an entertainment analyst for Houlihan, Lokey, Howard & Zukin, an investment banking firm. "And inflation really works to their advantage."

In the mid-1980's, when newspapers and magazines first began publishing weekend box-office figures, the studios resisted the trend. But soon, when they saw a way to use the lists to help market films, the process was gradually co-opted and controlled by the studios, which can simply ride the inflation rocket and release their movies in more and more theaters to create record after record. Producers of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," for instance, have been promoting it as the No. 1 romantic comedy of all time, which is true, to a degree. It has made about $218 million since its release in April, beating the previous record of $178 million set by "Pretty Woman" in 1990. But adjust those 1990 dollars for inflation, and "Pretty Woman" made $244 million in today's economy.

And in terms of the actual attendance, about 37 million tickets were sold for "Greek Wedding" compared with 42 million for "Pretty Woman."....

I meant to post this earlier, but someone posted a list of this year's top 10; in the meantime, the Adobe folks gave me trouble with their software. I've also excerpted this because show-biz news is so much bull. (The fact that Lyman gives us that overused quote source Paul Dergarabedian is a dead giveaway.) Still I've put this up because in the next week we'll get the usual PR treating the new box-office "records" with a joy akin to the Second Coming. Note the number from 1929: per-capita movie attendance that year was 40. Now it's 5. What's more, the industry was up against a powerful radio business that filled at least as many hours with original entertainment as today; against the theater, which was never healthier than in the 1920s, and stayed reasonably firm till well after the war; against vaudeville, dying in those days, but still with a presence in nearly every hamlet, an entertainment form that would live on for several decades more as burlesque. I haven't mentioned ballrooms and dance halls -- or that many movie houses offered live entertainment themselves. Sorry, there were lots of choices even in that low-tech world. They appealed to every taste. And however much the news hacks will deny it, they were BETTER.

I could go on. But I do get frustrated when I hear these well-paid sycophants talking show-biz as though we're in a golden age. We're in an age of unredeemed dross.

P.S. I mention in another thread that I live in Philadelphia. In downtown we once had something like ten big movie pleasure palaces. Now we have ZERO. We don't even have a multiplex. The closest sardine plant is miles away, in South Philly, and our only movie house is an arthouse. When I feel bad for our plight, I think of what Jack Valenti and his crew churn out, and I say, who needs the movies?

I can never revise too much. The sentence about radio should read that the business "filled at least as many hours with original entertainment as TV does today." I stand by that despite cable and its profusion of channels; I'd bet eighty percent of all today's TV offerings are reruns, and half of the rest are the modern equivalents of "live remotes." Until magnetic tape radio didn't have the luxury of repeating itself.

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