Hollywood still slugging despite slump
Summer box office lull may be part of studios’ strategy not to pack all its hits into a single season
If the movie business were an actual movie — say, a cliché action film — August would have been that point 90 minutes in when the hero gets kicked in the teeth, the bad guy takes the girl hostage and all seems lost.
As far as ticket sales are concerned, this summer really bombed — especially last month. But it wasn’t a total surprise: Hollywood held back some of its biggest bets and didn’t even bother rolling out a major film on the Labour Day weekend, cementing its worst summer in a decade.
Life, however, is about to imitate art. Like our hero’s eventual recovery, the year’s saviours have arrived — led by a homicidal clown and Luke Skywalker. The fall movie season has barely begun, and the industry is already rebounding thanks to a record audience for the horror film It and a calendar full of highly anticipated releases.
“The movie business isn’t quite dead yet,” Lionsgate Entertainment Corp. vice-chairman Michael Burns said at a Goldman Sachs conference last week.
For the full year through Sunday, North American theatres garnered US$7.9 billion in ticket sales, down 4.9 per cent from the same period last year, ComScore reports. Returns for the fall starting Labour Day, however, are running 39 per cent ahead of the year-earlier period, thanks largely to Warner Bros. Pictures’ It, which has raked in a record $219.7 million in domestic theatres.
As shabby as the movie business has looked since May, it’s worth noting that some of that was by design. This year, domestic theatres recorded their best March and April periods in history, thanks to Walt Disney Co.’s Beauty and the Beast and Universal Pictures’ eighth instalment in the Fast & Furious franchise. A decade ago, both of those films would have been parked in July or August, according to Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com.
“This year represents something that the industry has been building toward: an increased focus on the year-round calendar,” Robbins said.
Over the years, Hollywood’s gurus shuffled movies around to maximize revenue: artsy Oscar bait over the holidays, horror films before Halloween and big, blockbuster CGI spectacles in the summer.
Somewhere along the way, that logic became too tidy and prescriptive. The industry slowly realized the popcorn-stuffed hoi polloi don’t want to watch all the finely crafted tear-jerkers in December and, every once in a while, in the middle of winter, they get thirsty for a bro in tights. Moviegoers, it seems, aren’t so easily typecast.
Meanwhile, June, July, and August are no longer an entertainment dead zone outside of movie theatres. Whereas summer television was traditionally ruled by meaningless baseball games and sitcom reruns, it’s now a battlefield on which a fullscale entertainment war is being waged by streaming platforms and prestige programming. This year it was HBO’s Game of Thrones taking on standup comedy specials by Dave Chappelle on Netflix and Crave’s Emmy Award-winning The Handmaid’s Tale.
AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. chief financial officer Craig Ramsey says movie attendance tends to be cyclical. Slumps like the one we saw this summer tend to worsen because consumers miss out on the industry’s best advertising: the trailers before the main feature. That’s why, Ramsey was inordinately relieved to see that crowds are massing for It.
“Movie-going begets movie-going,” he said at last week’s conference. “We’ve got some movies, I think, coming up in the remainder of September and certainly the rest of the fourth quarter, where we can really kickstart the business.”
He may be right. The rest of 2017 is well stocked with monsters like Blade Runner 2049, two highly anticipated superhero films — Thor: Ragnarok debuting on Nov. 3 and Justice League a few weeks later — before finishing with the latest Star Wars instalment, The Last Jedi, on Dec. 15, the paragon of a blockbuster franchise.