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Though I’m not a statistician or sociologist, I tend to wonder if numbers like those suggest that the mass audience for movies is still out there, but Hollywood just isn’t making anything much they want to see. My wife and I both are looking forward to the latest Harry Potter, but have no interest in films like Syriana or Jarhead or other such obvious pedantry even though are political leanings are polar opposites.

What does the average movie ticket cost? If the average is 10$ then only a little over a million people went to see the film in a nation almost and maybe even more than 300 million.

The fourth installment is a masterful adaptation of another long book by screenwriter Steve Kloves. Kloves did what I thought impossible when he adapted Michael Chabon’s long and meandering second novel, Wonder Boys, into 1 hour and 51 minutes of compelling dramedy. I thought at the time that he was probably hired to do the Potter adaptations in anticipation of this installment. He deserves all praise that comes his way.

I enjoyed this installment of the movie version of seven years in the life of “the boy who lived” and will no doubt see it at least once more while it is in theaters. I could have sat through another hour and certain cut or curtailed storylines and I would have been thoroughly impressed by the stamina and interest of the young audience I was with (the movie, with credits, is 2 hours and 21 minutes long) had not I watched a three hour Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story adaptation with a five-years-old nephew at around this time last year. He made it through the whole thing without a complaint or a request. I, on the other hand, fell asleep for stretches of some duration during hours one, two and three.

The Force is with writers J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves.

I suppose Shirley Henderson as Moaning Myrtle isn’t eligible for a certain award for acting for the same reason Andy Serkis wasn’t in The Trilogy. Maybe she’ll get a nomination for this…

http://imdb.com/title/tt0423409/

Talk about something un-un-unadaptable!

…

The average movie ticket (children, seniors and matinees) is not $10.00 and it would be 10 million if it were.

Make that 2 hours and 37 minute.

Ten million is a helluva lot of people. That makes it the biggest open this year, doesn’t it?

The audience is out there still. Look at how voraciously the public devours consumer electronics, video games, DVDs, etc. And we’re only getting richer. It’s the movies that got small, not the audiences. $100 mil. in an opening weekend is very impressive for any movie, even more so when you consider that it’s the 4th in a series of movies. It’s a testament to the movie itself and to the refusal of the American public to give up on theaters.

Personally, I think there are a few things that could help the movie and theater industry substantially.

First, revert to the old system of starting a movie on a small number of screens and growing distribution as warranted by success. This prevents every new big budget movie from running all the successful flicks out of the theater when they come barging in, pushing their way onto thousands of screens only to flop and head into the dust bin a few weeks later. Smaller movies could stick around long enough to allow word of mouth to spread and allow more time for revenue to come in. And, of course, there would be a greater diversity of movies in the theater at any given time. A lot of cities that have acquired fancy new movie theaters (stadium seating, etc.) have had their old theaters turned into discount theaters where months old movies play for half or quarter price and have still been able to stay in business.

Second, theaters need to treat audiences better. Raising ticket prices and gouging people on concessions does not encourage people to visit the theaters. Rather than raising prices because so few seats are filled up, try to fill up more seats. Show movies people actually want to see and you won’t have a problem with making a profit. This issue is partly due to the big-splash screen allocation problem mentioned above. Theaters need to show more independence and backbone, if you cater to the movie studios you’ll end up, as we’ve seen, with empty theaters and dwindling revenues, if you cater to the audience you’ll end up with more profit than you can shake a stick at.

Third, release DVDs simultaneously with the theatrical release. This may seem insane from the idiotic perspective of the media boardrooms but it actually makes a lot of sense. You more than double the effectiveness of advertising, for good movies anyway, because you get not only the direct advertising but you get the best advertising possible, the full theatrical magnificence of the movie itself. How many times have you come out of a movie theater and said to yourself “damn, I want the DVD of that NOW”? Plus you catch word of mouth while it’s hot, instead of when it’s a months old memory. Most of the people I know who are movie buffs go to the theaters for the experience, not because it’s the only way to see a film.

These changes are unlikely in the near term though because the movie and theater industries have not yet hit the rock-bottom that might force them to reconsider their tactics. So the cycle continues. A new year rolls around and profits are down, what should be done? Why, try the tired old schemes again, only try harder this time!

I agree with Goodfellow on the DVD front – perhaps it would be possible to sell them only to movie ticket buyers to start out and thus avoid negative impact on ticket sales. The movie itself has a brilliant script but it leaves out far too much of the book – this movie should have been made in two parts.

I have never read a Harry Potter book or seen one of the movies. I guess I will have to change that.

I hear the author is a libertarian.

The main reason the HP series has managed to hold my interest is that it deals with character and values. In a sense, you can say that in HP’s world, character is everything.

In addition, J.K.Rowling consistently deals with the themes of:

loss,

yearning to belong,

friendship,

and helping others.

This particular installment also emphasizes meeting lifeís challenges while at the same time, as Dumbledore says, having to ìface the choice between what is right . . . and what is easyî.

So it does resonate with our times.

I really liked this adaptation, and found it very moving.

(now, if they didn’t photograph it so consistenly dark — are they using what Truffaut called “day for night”, or is it shot with low-wattage bulbs? How about a little sunshine on the happy scenes, please?)

But J.K.Rowling’s writing is brilliant in that she makes it entertaining and fun, so little kids want to read the whole 700+ pages. A couple of years ago, a six-year old came over to me while I was sitting in a park and proudly showed me his HP book, announcing that “he had learned to read so he could read Harry Potter!” I can’t think of a greater compliment to a writer.

Hollywood is in trouble because of it’s past success.

The industry as a whole has become too nepotistic and unable to respond to customer desires. So as noted people have substituted the internet, video games, old DVDs (DVD growth has slowed from double digits to single ones this year). Once you have say 100 DVDs or so, the marginal desire to buy one more that may well not be fun versus say, Die Hard or Finding Nemo is pretty low.

Look at say Anthony Zuicker, creator of CSI. About seven years ago he was driving a Tram in Las Vegas; now he’s the creator of a TV franchise. But marginally cult-successful people have more clout than he does because they went to the right Ivy League Schools and have the required second or third generation Hollywood background. Comic Sarah Silverman, an NYU grad who’d already made a name for herself as a NYC standup, wrote about her bitter experience at SNL and the Harvard Lampoon Mafia. Even though she was funny and drop dead beautiful, she couldn’t get stuff on the air because she wasn’t part of that social network. For an industry that depends on creativity and raw human capital this is disastrous. SNL is for smug Harvard grads, instead of raw comic geniuses like Chris Rock or Chappelle.

Hollywood is filled with bright, talented, upper 1/2 of 1% of the normal distribution in terms of writing, acting, and producing talent even with the huge nepotism and social network restrictions. What causes the failure to connect to audiences is that the social network requirements produces a huge emotional break from the audience. It’s hard to understand ala George Bush 1 that “this is for checking out?” (i.e. Supermarket Scanners) when your life has been pampered excess, a “Country Day” school or even better European boarding school, an Ivy League school in some easy Humanities major, and various relatives greasing the wheel for the first job or two. Hollywood is already an elite of talent (mostly), so this social isolation produces:

*The L Word, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, the Shield and other cable shows that have a hostile attitude towards ordinary life and ordinary people. Color it “Alan Ball disease” where middle America is presented as some sort of disease that only the tragically hip and anti-heroes can “cure.”

If you ever wonder WHY elite taste makers LOVE these kinds of shows and most people don’t it’s because the elites of Hollywood share the same cultural and social assumptions as the elite opinion makers who also view themselves as tragically hip.

*Johnny Depp, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall, Owen Wilson, Ashton Kutcher, Topher Grace, Josh Hartnett, Sean William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Ryan Reynolds, and other endless boys along with Kate Hudson, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Brittany Murphy, and other endless girls. Hollywood doesn’t ever want to grow up and show men and women onscreen.

*Excessive attention to “Oscar-bait” movies instead of profitability. Art-house movies like “In the Bedroom,” “In the Company of Men,” etc have their place; only an out-of-touch elite would push them as mainstream movies. Making a critical section of your audience even MORE uncomfortable is not going to encourage them to see more movies.

*Ignoring the obvious. Every time Hollywood makes a broad, mainstream movie (JK Rowling wrote the first Potter book hungry and cold) like Spider-Man, LoTR, Finding Nemo, etc. the money rolls in. Everytime they make a movie for themselves the money is not there. Ultimately they will be pushed by execs to satisfy their customers, or they will go the way of music publishers.

If I had money in entertainment, I’d want the CEOs to push for new talent from Australia and New Zealand, and also here in the US. More Zuickers and Rowlings and less of Third Generation Hollywood. The genius of guys like Warner or Mayer or such was that they grew up poor and hungry and remembered what it was like. A generation or two of Malibu is not going to prepare you to understand your audience.

Something of a response to points raised in the above comments…

1. The sixth, third and last (aside from the special editions and holiday specials) installment of the George Lucas franchise that lived (and died) on the importance to the plot of characters named C-3PO and R2-D2 had the biggest opening weekend thus far in 2005 and will be its biggest grosser both domestic and worldwide. What was a breath of fresh air and an effects revolution through two installments helped usher in what remains the current model for the production and distribution of the movies the studios depend on to generate, it is always hoped, profits. The less said about the other four installments the better.

2. Some movies do get limited releases first. Good Night, and Good Luck added 135 theaters on weekend 7 and a dropped 33.3% in box office receipts. There is absolutely no point in giving something like the movie under discussion a limited release as the average dropoff from week 1 to week 2 seems to be getting ever more pronounced. Consider this: On its opening weekend the first film in The Trilogy earned 15.3% of its eventual box office. It opened on 3,359 theaters and would add a mere 22 more before it peaked. The second opened on 3,622 screens (its peak) and earned 18.2% of its eventual box office on opening weekend. The third opened on 3,703 screens (its peak) and earned 19.3% of its eventual box office on opening weekend. What are you going to put on all those screens? Your best bet is to screen as many new releases as you reasonably can and hope that a few of them will continue to generate reasonable box office into a second or third month.

2. For those of you who didn’t notice, all of the major theater chains save AMC filed for bankruptcy protection between 1999 and 2001. It had something to do with overexpansion and competitive pricing during the last half of the last decade. Expect no more of that for years (especially if there are others like this one) to come.

3. As so often happens, someone else, in this case M. Night Shyamalan, put the case against simultaneous day-and-date releases so much better than I could a few weeks ago that I’ll just link to an article on what he had to say.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001391595

4. “I hear the author is a libertarian.” I, for one, don’t care what, if any, her politics are. She tells a good story.

5. And in that vain, I reject the conclusions of the very funny Rockford tirade as something that certainly explains all things except why Saw II (4 million production budget) cleared $80 million in domestic grosses today, its 25th day of release, and Cinderella Man (88 million production budget) has domestic grosses of under $62 million. All you have to do is watch Men In Black, listen to the Barry Sonnenfeld-Tommy Lee Jones commentary on the DVD of that movie, and watch Men In Black II to know that there are no guarantees when it comes to what you will end up with on any day prior to the commencement of the editing process and, to a lesser extent, whether or not an audience will line up to see what those with the power to do so decide to distribute. You can hedge your bets in any number of ways, but that’s about all you can do.

I argued that television was a volatile industry in which success and failure were determined week by week. Mr. Jensen said he did not like volatile industries and suggested with a certain sinister silkiness that volatility in business usually reflected bad management.

I could just as easily argue that that attitude is the cause of most of the problems in the entertainment industry as it exists today.

It’s been a bad year. String five or so of those together and things will no doubt change and maybe even for the better.

I could have spared you some of the above by just reprinting this plan with which I’ll close:

Bloom, worlds are turned on such thoughts!

Don’t you see, Bloom. Darling, Bloom, glorious Bloom, it’s so simple. Step one: We find the worst play in the world — a sure flop. Step two: I raise a million dollars — there’s a lot of little old ladies in this world. Step three: You go back to work on the books. Phoney lists of backers — one for the government, one for us. You can do it, Bloom, you’re a wizard.

Step four: We open on Broadway and before you can say ’step five’ we close on Broadway. Step six: We take our million dollars and fly to Rio de Janiero. Ah, Rio, Rio by the seao, meo, myo, meo …