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Movie attendance has been declining the last couple of years. The major Hollywood studios don't seem to understand why. I'm sure they blame some of it on Internet piracy, though I doubt anyone who is seriously interested in a first-run movie would bother to watch it on their PC in some blurry, low-fidelity version first. I'm sure they also blame it on other things, like gas prices and economic conditions.
I don't know about you, but there are several reasons that I don't go see movies anymore: - Ticket prices: By the time you buy tickets to take the family to see a first-run movie, you could have spent enough money to buy it on DVD, along with a truckload of microwave popcorn and soft drinks. If you go to the theater, you have to endure long lines, noisy people sitting around you, endless commercials and previews before the movie, etc. At home, you can fast-forward through those, have a beer while you watch it, pause while you head to the restroom, etc.
- Seeing Through the Hype: You know what I mean - you see a commercial on TV that makes a movie look really good, then you head to the theater and find out the only good parts are the ones you saw in the commercial. After a while, you know the difference between a good movie and a bad one. In my experience, any movie that you see being really heavily hyped through action figures, soundtracks, kids meal prizes, etc., long before it's in the theater is usually a piece of crap.
- Netflix: For a small monthly fee and a few-month wait, I can watch pretty much any movie I want. I still go to the theater for the ones I really care about (e.g., a Star Wars III, Austin Powers, Spiderman 2), but if I have the slightest question about the movie, I wait for Netflix. If I like it after that, I might just go buy the DVD. There's no sense spending the money watching movies that are only "marginally good".
- Too Many Formulaic Movies: Almost every Hollywood movie these days is made to fit a certain formula. For example, if Hollywood chose to make a movie version of Little Red Riding Hood, they wouldn't just re-tell the classic children's story or update it a bit to modern society. No, they'd probably cast Will Smith as "Ridin' Hood", a good-hearted street gang member who snaps off one-liners like "My, what a big a** you got, just right for kickin'!" as he beats up Big Bad Officer Wolfe, a racist cop who has it in for gang members. Ridin' Hood would have to fall in love along the way, probably with a character played by Angelina Jolie. In the end, Big Bad Officer Wolfe would realize the error of his racist ways and devote his life to actually stopping crime, Ridin' Hood would get to Grandma's House where he left his winning lottery ticket, and whatever made-up relationship crisis he had with Angelina Jolie would be resolved so everyone's rich, happy, and in love as the credits roll... during which we'd hear a whole lot of music (including some by Will Smith) that's only there to pad out the soundtrack album.
The thing Hollywood doesn't seem to realize is that movie-goers aren't idiots. We won't drop a lot of hard-earned money on something that looks like it's going to be a lousy movie. We also see through the hype in commercials and can tell the difference between a crappy movie, a marginal movie, and one worth seeing (at least a high percentage of the time). We have options (like cable networks, movie rentals, and pay-per-view) that let us watch the marginal stuff without having to pay theater pricing. And we're insulted when they clearly graft a superfluous love story onto an action film like Pearl Harbor, thinking it will make the movie appeal to women. We're doing just what consumers in every market do when the producers aren't delivering: We're voting with our wallets, and our votes aren't going to the crap they're trying to shove down our throats. But maybe, just maybe, Hollywood's starting to see the light. In a New York Times article dated August 24, 2005, the Chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, said: "Part of this is the fact that the movies may not have lived up to the expectations of the audience, not just in this year, but in years prior. Audiences have gotten smart to the marketing, and they can smell the good ones from the bad ones at a distance."
Later on in the article, Lynton is quoted as saying that Sony would be focusing on making "only movies we hope will be really good". The article then goes on to say that "Some of his own summer movies, he conceded, should never have been made." Robert Shaye of New Line Cinema had a bit more to say: In previous years, he said, "you could still count on enough people to come whether you failed at entertaining them or not, out of habit, or boredom, or a desire to get out of the house. You had a little bit of a backstop."
One of my favorite quotes from the article is from Robert A. Iger of Walt Disney, which is considering releasing movies on DVD at the same time they're in theaters: "We can't allow tradition to stand in the way of where the consumer can go, or wants to go," he told analysts this month, warning that "the music industry learned this the hard way."
I think all this means that Hollywood might finally be "getting it", even as the music industry is struggling desperately to sort itself out. We, the movie-goers, got it a long, long time ago.
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