In a world brimful of other ways for people to spend their time and money, Hollyweird can't seem to stop shooting itself in both feet to drive potential audiences away.
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Cinemas can't fill seats anymore because people are tired of Hollywood's repetitive garbage and heavy-handed leftist messaging. Now theater owners are raising ticket prices, thus further ensuring their decline.
A new report from the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) states that the average ticket price hit a new high in the second quarter of 2017 at $8.95, a 2.5 percent increase from last year.
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The 2017 box office has been abysmal for Hollywood, with studios seeing an eight percent drop from last year in overall domestic box office receipts.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Transformers: The Last Knight, Alien: Covenant, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, The Mummy, and Baywatch have all seriously under-performed in the domestic box office.Nobody's entire studio lot has gone under in this town since MGM ate the big weiner in 1974.
But as every mutual fund prospectus reminds you:
Past behavior is no guarantee of future performance.
And like raising bus fares because of dwindling ridership, increasing ticket prices as movies slip from sucky to absolutely atrocious is the beginnings of a death spiral. And as long as the idiots are in charge, there may not be another generation of Spielbergs, Lucases, and Scorseses in the wings to save the ballgame this time around.
Nobody should be happy about that (although I thoroughly applaud the punishment of the libtards who're running the industry into the ground), because movies are first and foremost, the quintessential American art form. It doesn't matter how many other countries had or have thriving movie industries, or how well they do at it, they are all incomparably lesser than anything that's come out of America since Edison made the first "flicker". We invented the art form, we've perfected it, we dominate it, and by all that's right we should continue to do so until long after I'm cold and dead, and past caring.
So watching a bunch of shit-for-brains idiots run it into the ground is like watching the third- and fourth-generation kids of your family squander the fortune your father left you, and which you built into a gargantuan behemoth, and seeing them do it like setting fire to the family cash pile with torches.
A Visigoth is still a Visigoth, even if they're allegedly your kin.
It IS sad.
ReplyDeleteEveryone says Hollywood is out of ideas. I know they get a lot of script submissions, so I'm not so sure it's that at all. There are also a lot of GREAT books that can be made into movies.
I think the problem is that unlike the 80's, where Hollywood was willing to experiment a little (hell, they're still making remakes and sequels of what came out 30+ years ago), so MUCH money goes into these movies that they're afraid of a flop. Once they're ALL flops, then Hollywood will start to experiment again.
The other problem is the fear of offending anyone now. The Hugo awards are a big clue - never depend on them for good sci-fi now, or even an arrow to the direction of a good book. Early Heinlein would never have made it to the table these days. P.C. is also killing Hollywood. They'll get over that when they lose enough money - like all "socialists", they chuck away their political pretense when their wallets are affected.
Theaters - whole different story. At home you can pause, go to the bathroom, get up and get a snack, etc. Movies have become so LONG that the "Intermission" SERIOUSLY needs to make a comeback. Squished into an uncomfy chair for 2.5 hours straight for entertainment is too much. It's not a necessary dental procedure.
That's another thing - Alamo Draft House gets a lot right in term of theaters. Going to a movie needs to become an EVENT again, worth that ticket price. Have tables and chairs for some movies, get alcohol licenses for beer, serve good food, bring great food TO the chairs of people, and get some comfy chairs in there where people can get their feet up, combined with an intermission. Maybe add on cartoons and shorts like they did in the old days. Then it becomes a whole evening of entertainment, worth the ticket price.
Now? With home entertainment systems being what they are, it's NOT worth it. For the first time in my life, (and I saw Star Wars when it was released in '77 in a theater), I didn't go to a theater to watch Rogue One (a Star Wars movie, obviously). The experience of going out to see a movie is no longer pleasurable. Overpriced snacks, stuck in an uncomfy chair forever, just no. It was a fun movie, and it was fun AT HOME on a large TV.
Those are some solves. I'd suggest Hollywood take those risks now BEFORE the going gets even harder. Read some books. Make movies out of the good ones. Forget PC, people are sick of it. Just MAKE GOOD STORIES.
Oh, and nobody gives a DAMN what actors and actresses think about politics, and if they keep pissing people off too much, people will avoid their movies. Maybe they can learn from that also. Hire new talent - the old ones think they actually have degrees that are pertinent to what they're mouthing. They're not fooling anyone anymore.
I have a 65" tv and surround sound
ReplyDeleteIts not quite the cinema, but its a good enough facsimile that its barely worth putting pants on and going to the cinema, never mind paying the £10 a ticket when there.
Added to that, there are now much better offerings on tv than there were.
The cinema is going to have to alter to get my money, and its hard to say how