Box office suffers poor summer season
Movie attendance dips to lowest level since 1992
LOS ANGELES - As Hollywood wraps up the all-important summer box office season this Labor Day weekend, a sobering reality has gripped the industry.
The number of tickets sold in the United States and Canada this summer is projected to fall to the lowest level in a quarter-century.
The results have put the squeeze on the nation’s top theater chains, whose stocks have taken a drubbing. AMC Theatres Chief Executive Adam Aron last month called his company’s most recent quarter “simply a bust.”
Such blunt language reflects some worrisome trends. Domestic box office revenue is expected to total $3.78 billion for the first weekend of May through Labor Day, down nearly 16% from the same period last year, according to comScore. That’s an even worse decline than the 10% drop some studio executives predicted before the summer began.
And the number of actual tickets sold paints a bleaker picture, with total admissions likely to clock in at about 425 million, the lowest level since 1992, according to industry estimates.
No one can fully explain why. Studios, movie theater owners and analysts cited the usual explanations for the summer slump. There are the obvious reasons: Too many bad movies, including sequels, reboots and aging franchises that no one wanted to see. Some point to rising ticket prices, which hit a record high in the second quarter, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. Then there are long-term challenges, including competition from streaming services such as Netflix and the influence of the movie review site Rotten Tomatoes. How about all of the above?
What is clear: This summer was marred with multiple high-profile films that flopped stateside, including “The Mummy,” “Baywatch,” “The Dark Tower” and “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.” Sequels to the “Alien,” “Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises also disappointed. (International ticket sales are helping to ease some of the pain.)
The business is also reckoning with broader, longer-term threats that have kept Americans from flocking to theaters the way they used to. People now have more entertainment options than ever, and cinemas have struggled to keep up, despite efforts to adapt with improved technology and services, industry analysts say. The problem is exacerbated by an unforgiving social media environment in which bad movies are immediately punished by online word of mouth.
Some worry that summer movies have simply lost their place as the top entertainment touchstones American consumers are talking about, as acclaimed shows such as “Game of Thrones” on HBO and “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu dominate the cultural conversation.
“The floor beneath the entertainment market is not as stable as it was 10 years ago,” said Jeff Bock, box office analyst with tracking firm Exhibitor Relations. “There’s a lot of different things that monopolize people’s discussions, and most of them are not movies. The product is just not worth talking about.”
The long-term challenges are pushing studios to adapt. They’re discussing ways to make movies available for streaming earlier after their theatrical releases through iTunes and video on-demand services, despite resistance from theater chains. MoviePass, a New York-based company that sells subscriptions to let people see a virtually unlimited number of movies, became a topic of heated debate when it recently lowered its monthly fee to $9.95.
Overall, the industry has been to slow to embrace changing viewer habits, some analysts say.
“The rest of the entertainment industry has evolved, and movies haven’t,” said Doug Creutz, media analyst at Cowen & Co. “People are only going to see movies they think they have to see in theaters, and there aren’t that many of them.”
To be sure, summer wasn’t all bad. The movies that succeeded did so by achieving critical acclaim, satisfying the desires of underserved audiences, and by offering something fresh and original. Warner Bros.’s DC film “Wonder Woman,” the summer’s top movie, grossed more than $400 million domestically by finally bringing a female superhero to the big screen. Raunchy comedy “Girls Trip,” from Universal Pictures, collected $108 million by targeting black women. Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” and Sony’s “Baby Driver” proved that original concepts can still draw big crowds to the theaters.