Jaap Buitendijk
The release of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2" brought young people into theaters, but continuing economic hardship means the prime movie audience hasn't been flocking to the box office.
LOS ANGELES -- With five days left in 2011, movie ticket sales in North America are running about $500 million behind last year - despite higher prices - prompting a round of soul searching by studios trying to determine what went wrong and how best to proceed.
Movies are a cyclical business and analysts say that 2010 benefited mightily from holdover sales for "Avatar," which was released late in 2009 and became one of the most popular movies of all time. A decline of hundreds of millions of dollars is not catastrophic when weighed against the size of the industry. Overall, North American ticket revenue for 2011 is projected to be about $10.1 billion, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles box-office data.
That is only a 4.5 percent falloff from 2010. But revenue has also been propped up by a glut of 3-D films, which cost $3 to $5 more per ticket. Theaters have also continued to increase prices for standard tickets; moviegoers now pay an average of $7.89 each, up 1 percent over last year.
Attendance for 2011 is expected to drop 5.3 percent, to 1.27 billion, continuing a slide. Attendance declined 6 percent in 2010.
What has gone wrong? Plenty, say studio distribution executives, who point to competition for leisure dollars, particularly among financially pressed young people (the movie industry's most coveted demographic); too many family movies; and the continued erosion of star power.
One more thing: "You have to go back and look at the content," said Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution for Warner Brothers. "Good movies always rise to the occasion. Bad ones, not so much."
Young people, defined by studios as teenagers and people in their 20s, certainly helped power some of the biggest movies of 2011, including Warner's "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2," the year's No. 1 release with $381 million in domestic ticket sales. But a spate of smaller movies aimed at younger audiences bombed.
"As bad as the economy is for adults, it's worse for teenagers," said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com, by way of an explanation. "Because they have less disposable income and because they are more plugged in to audience reaction on Facebook and Twitter, the teenage audience is becoming picky," he added. "That's a nightmare for studios that are used to pushing lowest-common-denominator films."
