The Business of Movies

Dave Pollard points to a great article in The New Yorker on the history of the blockbuster. Movie buffs will be familiar with a lot of the details the article lays out, but it’s still a very readable (and quotable) piece:

And what is the main cinematic experience? The tickets, including the surcharge for ordering online, cost about the same as the monthly cable bill. A medium popcorn is five dollars; the smallest bottled water is three. The show begins with twenty minutes of commercials, spots promoting the theatre chain, and previews for movies coming out next Memorial Day, sometimes a year from next Memorial Day. The feature includes any combination of the following: wizards; slinky women of few words; men of few words who can expertly drive anything, spectacularly wreck anything, and leap safely from the top of anything; characters from comic books, sixth-grade world-history textbooks, or “Bulfinch’s Mythology”; explosions; phenomena unknown to science; a computer whiz with attitude; a brand-name soft drink, running shoe, or candy bar; an incarnation of pure evil; more explosions; and the voice of Robin Williams.

I can only assume that ‘Bulfinch’s Mythology’ refers to the tremendously unoriginal Harry Potter films.

Interestingly, the piece claims that the term ‘blockbuster’ was ‘appropriated from real-estate jargon’. If that’s true, real estate borrowed the word from the Royal Air Force. During World War II, it was slang for a particularly large bomb.[more]

In his post, Dave misrepresents a few of the facts. While I agree with both his and The New Yorker’s assessment of the poor quality of cinema, I wanted to clarify a few points:

• The article states that during the studio era, studios released 500 – 700 films a year. In his chart, Dave selects a particular year, 1946, where the 700 films were released. Clearly the average over that period was 600.
• He also states that “that actual attendance and popularity of films, by any measure, are in a long-term and steep decline.” The article states that attendance “bottomed out in the early nineteen-seventies, at fifteen million, but it has not climbed much since.” Clearly that’s not a steep decline.
• Finally, Dave fails to recognize that while cinema attendance is down, film viewership is not. In 2004, the world bought 1.9 billion DVDs (I couldn’t find USA-only stats in my brief search). In a world where films frequently make more money after the movie leaves the theatre, the movie has become a two-hour ad for the DVD.

In writing this item, I happened upon this item on movie-making oligoplies.