Stephen Lang, Sam Worthington in Avatar (Mark Fellman / 20th Century Fox)
Earlier this week, it was announced with much fanfare that despite the painful economic times the movie business is having a record year, with more than $10 billion earned at the US/Canada box office in 2009. Among the year's biggest hits were Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and Up. Additionally, hits such as The Blind Side and Avatar will have much of their income tallied only next year, and — if they're successful — the same will happen with It's Complicated, Sherlock Holmes, Nine, Up in the Air, and The Lovely Bones.
Now, although $10 billion is an impressive figure for most industries (definitely not for military contractors), it's a box-office record only because ticket prices keep going up nearly every year. In fact, Hollywood could break box-office records annually if ticket prices were hiked up a certain percentage each year so as to offset any expected drop (or lack of increase) in ticket sales.
Hollywood.com estimates that in 2009 ticket sales will grow by 9 percent over 2008 (which had a 4.5 percent drop from the previous year), with a 5 percent rise in the actual number of tickets sold. Yet, according to the New York Times, "when adjusted for inflation, 2002 had sales of $11.21 billion, while the totals for 2001, 2003 and 2004 also exceed this year’s tally."
Putting things in perspective: according to Box Office Mojo, 1,403 billion tickets have been sold in 2009, while in 2002 that figure reached 1,575 billion. The box-office record-breaking looks considerably less smashing that way, doesn't it? (Outside the US and Canada, ticket sales have grossed $15 billion, up about 5 percent from 2008, though that figure can be partly explained by the dollar's dramatic fall in a number of key film markets.)
Putting things in even better perspective: In 1947, an estimated 90 million people went to the movies every week in the United States (population: 144 million). That meant approximately 4,680 billion tickets sold even without state-of-the-art special effects, multiplexes, megabudgeted sequels, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, or Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.
The top movies of 1947? (Above, John Garfield and Gregory Peck in Gentleman's Agreement.)
All were big-studio star vehicles. Few boasted special effects (Green Dolphin Street has a major earthquake), but those movies offered lots of character, some adventure, plenty of romance, and quite a bit of drama, music, and comedy. It was a different audience then; also, TV was just beginning, and there was no digital cable, DVD, pay-per-view, or online XXX flicks and chatrooms to keep people away from movie houses.
Below is the list of the top 20 films of 1947, via boxofficereport.com:
- Welcome Stranger (Bing Crosby, Joan Caulfield, Barry Fitzgerald)
- The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Shirley Temple)
- The Egg and I (Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray)
- Unconquered (Gary Cooper, Paulette Goddard)
- Life With Father (William Powell, Irene Dunne)
- Forever Amber (Linda Darnell, Cornel Wilde, Richard Greene)
- Road to Rio (Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour)
- Green Dolphin Street (Lana Turner, Van Heflin, Richard Hart, Donna Reed)
- Mother Wore Tights (Betty Grable, Dan Dailey, Mona Freeman)
- Cass Timberlane (Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner)
- California (Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland)
- Gentleman's Agreement (Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, John Garfield)
- Dear Ruth (William Holden, Joan Caulfield, Mona Freeman)
- The Perils of Pauline (Betty Hutton, John Lund)
- The Hucksters (Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Ava Gardner)
- Captain From Castille (Tyrone Power, Jean Peters)
- The Sea of Grass (Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Melvyn Douglas)
- Variety Girl (all-star)
- This Time For Keeps (Esther Williams, Jimmy Durante, Johnnie Johnston)
- Fiesta (Esther Williams, Ricardo Montalban, Cyd Charisse)
I left Piracy at the back for a reason, it is huge but not as game-changing as people make it out. The other factors are a lot more important and you have to agree with me on that one. People still watch movies as much as they did, it's just that they have more ways of doing that now.
And about your piracy questions. Those numbers are very exact since a tracker (sort of a bridge between servers and people downloading a and uploading stuff like movies, music or games) keeps track of the exact number of people that have downloaded a certain file. When it comes to the quality of the movie they vary depending on how soon they are released. They range from cams to Blue-Ray rips in full 1080p glory. And I'm pretty sure it's impossible to keep track of every single tracker that is offering this stuff so 11 million could very well be 20 million since that site that reported 11 can only keep track of so many torrent trackers.
So piracy is not something to ignore mate.
The lack of other venues for film-watching is mentioned in the article.
TorrentFreak is the source for the 11 million pirated "Star Trek" downloads. Even if their figures are accurate (they're based on BitTorrent data and I don't know how that data is compiled), one can download "Star Trek" and still watch it on the big screen. Unless, perhaps, you're in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. How good was the pirated version? High-def? Or a crappy recording some idiot did at a movie theater?
Also, those 11 million downloads weren't all done in the US, and their impact at the US box office is highly debatable regardless of what the MPAA says.
Here's an interesting article on piracy claims:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-shapiro/dear-fcc-please-dont-let_b_355191.html
But piracy is on the rise too
I'm so but this article is very much flawed by comparing a year like 1947 when to only option to see a movie or anything for that matter was going to a theater.
Now we have every single movie that comes out in theaters at home in 6 months or less, either on DVD/Blue-Ray, pay per view or stuff like HBO. And did I mention piracy? Star Trek alone is said to have been downloaded from the internet more then 11 million times. That's almost 100 million in ticket sells right there, not to mention that a movie that you download can be seen by 2,3,4 or 10 people. So while the movie was downloaded 11 million times, more then 100 million people might have seen it, all of that without paying anything else but their Internet connection.
People like and watch movies just as much (if not more) then they did 62 years ago, it's just that today we have a lot more ways to do it.