Posted on 12/24/2005 4:09:09 PM PST by Daralundy
The slump, now three years running, prompts the industry to ask: 'What's wrong with the movies?'
LOS ANGELES - Hollywood's year-ending good news is that moviegoers are opening hearts and pocketbooks for "King Kong" - more than $60 million on its debut weekend and counting.
The bad news is that audiences did not exactly go ape over the rest of 2005's cinema offerings, making this the third straight year of decline in Hollywood ticket sales - the first such stretch of bad news in 40 years. Because of the continued falloff - sales are down 12.6 percent from 2002 - a growing number of analysts wonder if America's movie habits are changing permanently.
"The industry has to consider whether or not American audiences are sending a message about the quality of the movies they are getting - or just the way and the place in which they get them," says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a firm that analyzes box-office trends. "You can bet that producers, writers, directors, and studio heads are all huddling intensely to consider what this means and change their behavior to keep it from continuing."
It could just be a continued shift away from multiplexes toward Blockbuster, Netflix, and other home-viewing options, Mr. Dergarabedian and others say.
In this scenario, consumers are changing their movie-viewing habits because of multiple complaints related to theater-going: soaring ticket costs, high parking and candy-concession prices, and, perhaps, decreased enjoyment of the movie-house experience because of unruly audiences and growing numbers of on-screen ads.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Earth to Hollywood. Make a movie positive about the U.S. military in Iraq or Afghanistan and people will flock to it.
"Perhaps it's because they're all democrats ;o)"
That explains why they have no new ideas.
Can't wait to see the new Vietnam movie that will come out in the summer of 06. Just in time to put a new anti American spin on things, whip the far left into a frenzy, bring in about 100 mil to the party so they can lose more Senate and House seats then wonder what went wrong.
They did.
What? Did you expect the leftist MSM to remind people from whence they came?
LOTR/ Lord of the Rings
You should see the SCTV sendup, "King of the Popes". Catherine O'Hara does a slammin Katherine Hepburn.
There is only so much Peter O'Toole roaring I can take.
Senator, there was a little thing called the Sexual Revolution.
Before Spielberg in ET, nobody know how to write children in a way that wasn't Disney sickening saccharine. Disney movies during the 70's were hack junk with predictable plots, lousy slapstick heavy scripts, and fourth rate actors. Disney was where careers went to die. Nobody during the 70's who was the least bit cool would touch anything Disney with a ten foot pole.
Spielberg showed Disney how to write children for a new age. For a new audience. Then in the 80's it could start to recover.
Yes, they will. And with the wide choice and easy availabilty of on demand movies on cable I predict the Blockbuster stores will also be all but gone soon.
You are right on the money. Methinks the 2006 Academy Awards Presentations is going to be a non-viewed episode. Actually everthing nominated is either in the tank or flushing down the toilet bowl. From gays to George Clooney's, Edward R. Murrow doc and Syriana, to the rash of failed comedy projects, and the weak opening of Speilberg's "Munich", Hollywood is going nowhere. The liberal, Democrat scum are living in a bubble that is about to burst.
I wonder when the executives of the major studios are going to wake up to the facts that they are losing their shirts. One might remember the Richard Gere movie " An Officer and a Gentlemen" where the "Black" Navy Drill Sargent says to his new recruit group, "There are two things that come out of Arizona, steers and queers"!!! Seems like we are getting a bellyful of sheep and queers, two species made for each other. I have no bias against gay folk, but the fact is, they are a tiny percentage of our population, and to highlight them as an acceptable mainstream group is going nowhere. Has anyone ever seen a really old gay person. What happens to gays when they get older. They have no family, no children, no support system other then their own disfunction. Sad commentary. No one has use or purpose for a burned out, old and non-performing gay. Think about it liberals and Democrat vermin before you hitch you star to a losing cause.
Hollywood is rolling in dough. It's the theater owners that are sucking wind. Hollywood makes money off foriegn distribution, cable screenings and DVD sales. None of which beneift theater owners at all. Hollywood doesn't need box office numbers, it can and does make up the money elsewhere. Even Waterworld wound up being a financial success for everyone but the poor saps that couldn't sell seats.
The studios aren't losing money. See #150.
(1) A "Western" featuring fudge-packing sheep-herders
(2) A "tearjerker" featuring a pre-op male-to-female transsexual
(3) Evil drug companies comitting genocide in Africa for profit
(4) Portayal of the Munich '72 murderers as freedom-fighting family men, and Israelis as bloodthirsty criminals
(5) Tales of a bi-sexual hitman
And these are just the Oscar front-runners! What else could American familes want to see???
They still haven't figured out the lessons of The Passion of the Christ, haven't they?
I was watching Robbie the Reindeer on ABC with my 5 year old grandson and the lead Reindeer was so gay acting( hands on the hips, flipping his hoofs, lisping when he talked) my grandson asked what was the matter with him and was he sick???
I said yes and changed the channel.
One thing those old movies did is tell good stories. That quality seems to be absent from many modern flicks. There's too many modern movies about some marginalized character's life that is boring after five minutes and death by the end of the movie. Together with the continual anti-American themes of many of them, today's flicks are simply too tedious to sit through.
That's why I agree with you. Nothing beats a movie that has the element of what-will-happen-next? in it. Most of the old great flicks had that constant tension it it. Today's flicks about some ahem alienated freak's miserable, dull life just don't do it for me. That is what is killing Hollyweird: dull stories and agenda-driven scripts.
I believe it was released in 1975. Walt knew children and overall family taste very well.
Movies made by the Disney Studios after 1973 were heavy in those things as you say, resulting in the drop in revenues. I labeled them "bombs" as I was referring to the departure from the family type. There was a big drip in earning, all of which helped to bring out the today's Disney troubles.
You're right!
Did you see "It's a Wonderful Life" with James Stewart and Donna Reed last night? Now here is a classic made in 1948.
No, I don't think it was a departure from the family type. After all, remember how much money the main studios lost in the early 70's trying to repeat the success of the "The Sound of Music" with one big budget musical after another. Have you seen "Hello Dolly" ? That thing in present dollars must have cost a fortune.
It is that the family market wasn't there. A massive cultural paradigm shift was making the family movie as obsolete as the Ed Sullivan-style variety show. During the 70s cultural consensus broke down completely. The market fragmented into the cultural left and the cultural right. In TV the shows that appealed to older, rural viewers (Mayberry RFD, Gomer Pyle, Red Skelton Show, Petticoat Junction) were dumped in favor of the new sitcoms aimed at urban sophisticated audiences (All in the Family, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore Show, etc).
Disney did not depart from the family movie during the 70's. They just made the same stuff they had been making in the 50's and 60's for an audience that had outgrown them. They didn't adjust their saccharine depictions of kids to the fact that kids since 1970 grow up a whole lot faster. Children nowadays understand that babies don't come from storks.
That is a true statement. What we are going to see in coming years is movies going right to DVD and DVR. Theaters will be a thing of the past.
However with that comes critics reviews going away and other bias commentary. In addition, Hollywood will suffer even with foreign sales because it will get out that it no longer represents the values of America.
The left says we are hated worldwide. They are correct in their assessment. It is because the world views us through Hollywoods eyes. The homosexuality, anti-death penalty and other leftists values aren't even main stream in Communist countries. They are tools used to identify what is wrong in this world so they can eradicate it.
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