2010: Week 24 Blots

BLOT: (20 Jun 2010 - 10:00:52 PM)

Glancing at US Box Office Figures and Their Averages

I became curious about average in-takes for the US Box Office after reading a Entertainment Weekly article on how gloom and doom the summer ticket sales are this year (alas, looking on their site didn't bring it up, but it's a couple of issues back if you have hardcopy access) and so decided to crunch through a few numbers. The result of which is this table of the past 15 years of ticket sales compared to the first half of 2010 (click on link for Google Dos). There isn't a whole lot of market report worthy numbers, there, but there are a few fun facts to digest.

• In the 90s, ticket prices rose on average about 10 cent per years which jumped to about 20 cents per year the next decade, but has risen from 30 cents to a nearly 50 cent jump in the past couple of years.
• The biggest jump in ticket sales was from 2001-2002. While this could be attributed to a country trying to relax after the tense events of late 2001, it is also the result of not only Spider-Man, but also a series of sequels (Stars Wars, Harry Potter, Austin Powers, MiB, and Lord of the Rings). Coupled with the strong indie hit of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the 2002 box office became the template of our current movie market.
• While a few of the bigger releases (Toy Story 3, Shrek's new one, The Karate Kid, and so forth) have yet to finish their run, if 2010 stays on course with its six-month mark, it can be as far down as nearly 300 million tickets sold. However, with its 133% higher than average ticket prices, it stands to still be higher than the average Box Office. It would still be an 8-year low. My guess is that it will finish higher than that, thanks to the mid- and late-Summer contenders, but you are still going to get a lot of bitching from the executives on this one. Then again, nearly every movie offered follows the "2002 formula": remixes, reduxes, sequels, and hopefully bankable indie-fare.
• One of the big factors leading to the steep increase in ticket prices is the advent of 3D popularity. The downside of which seems to be fewer individual movies are given a chance. This is leading to a stacking of movie sales to a few heavy contenders, normalized across max capacity and crowd annoyance, backfiring overall accross the whole market.