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L. Kent Wolgamott: Reasons for the box-office slump

Thursday, Jun 30, 2005 - 10:59:49 pm CDT

The Chicken Littles of the movie business are in full cry, wringing their hands and running for cover because the box office is in its biggest year-to-year slump in two decades.

Last weekend was the 18th weekend in a row the box office declined compared to the previous year, passing a 1985 slump of 17 weekends that had been the longest since analysts began keeping detailed figures on movie grosses.

Revenues for the top 12 movies came in at $116.5 million, down 16 percent from the same weekend last year.

Theater revenues have skidded about 7 percent compared to last year. Factoring in higher ticket prices, movie admissions are off 10 percent for the year, according to box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

By my count, the slump dates back to the final weekend in February. That just happens to be the weekend that Mel Gibson released the box office surprise of 2004: "The Passion of the Christ."

Recall that Gibson's much-talked-about picture filled theaters for a month and ran well into the summer, taking in $370.2 million at the box office. That was free money for the movie business, an unexpected hit in one of the slowest seasons of the year. Replicating that would have been impossible.

Then, when "The Passion" finally lost steam, another film hit the screens that also broke box office records — for its genre. That movie was "Fahrenheit 9/11." Michael Moore's documentary was released on June 25 and did the majority of its $119 million at the box office in its first month of release. It did $23.5 million in its opening weekend, exactly one year ago.

Hence the "slump" this past weekend.

So, unless some unexpected picture comes out of the woodwork to match the extra income generated by "Fahrenheit 9/11," it's likely that the box office downturn will continue for the next month, and perhaps longer.

The critical point here is that audiences for "Fahrenheit 9/11" and especially "The Passion of the Christ" were primarily made up of people who are not regular filmgoers. That gave the 2004 box office a boost that is never likely to be repeated.

Take those two pictures out of the mix and maybe the sky isn't falling — or at least it isn't falling as hard as we're being led to believe that it is.

That said, the movie business unquestionably has some problems, primarily of its own making.

The first cause cited for the slump by nearly all industry insiders is the increasing popularity of home entertainment systems — that people are staying home and watching DVDs on their increasingly large and sophisticated systems.

That probably is something of a factor. But the studios are cutting their own throats at the box office by shortening the window between a movie's theatrical run and its release on DVD.

That gap was formerly somewhere in the six-month range. But since they now make most of their profit from DVDs, studios have been edging up the home viewing releases to three or four months after the picture was in theaters — a definite disincentive for moviegoers.

The studios probably don't care as much about that as they let on — they're making a profit regardless. It's the exhibitors who show the pictures, like Lincoln's Douglas Theater Co., that are getting the short end of this deal as they see their business dwindle away and their auditoriums become advertising venues for DVDs.

But the root cause of the box office slump is simple: Hollywood just is not making that many good movies.

So far this year, I can think of two major releases that I'd call great — "Batman Begins" and "Cinderella Man." Falling somewhere between major and art house release were "Crash" and "Sin City," two more excellent pictures.

Beyond that … well … creativity seems to be exhausted, leaving theaters full of sequels, remakes and formula pictures, a combination that is rarely, if ever, entertaining.

Of the summer pictures, "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" was mediocre and is already done at the box office; "Madagascar," good but not great, didn't measure up to "Shrek 2"; and Will Ferrell, who was hot for about a year, is now leading the bomb squad with "Kicking and Screaming" and last weekend's stinker, "Bewitched."

As always, the "we need more movies for families" crowd didn't come out to support a G-rated movie: "Herbie: Fully Loaded."

There's not much that needs to be said about dreck like "The Honeymooners," "The Amityville Horror," "Guess Who" and "House of Wax" other than "Who ever thought this was good?"

Maybe the teens and 20somethings that are the target audience for most of today's pictures have figured out that Hollywood is still operating on P.T. Barnum's maxim that there's a sucker born every minute and have stopped going to movies that look bad before the first frame runs through the projector. Imagine that.

If Hollywood made better movies, it's a pretty safe bet that people would go to see them. But as long as the bean counters devoted to maximizing profit at the expense of creativity continue to run the studios, don't count on that happening any time soon.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.