The End of an Era…
Could it be? Could it possibly be?
The L.A. Times reports on what the industry is looking into to explain falling ticket sales – and it isn’t piracy.
“It’s really easy for all of us to blame the condition of the theaters, gas prices, alternative media, the population changes and everything else I’ve heard myself say,” said Sony Pictures Vice Chairman Amy Pascal, whose summer releases “Bewitched” and “Stealth” flopped. “I think it has to do with the movies themselves.”
After months of hand-wringing and doomsday forecasts about the permanent erosion of moviegoing, the lunchtime chatter at Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills and other industry haunts has turned decidedly inward. Now, four straight weekends of crowded theaters have forced moguls and creative executives to admit in public what they have spent months avoiding: They were clueless about what audiences wanted.
Even more amazing, this isn’t the first such article that I’ve read. Variety’s print edition a few weeks ago (Variety, by the way, is a daily publication) ran an article buried in the back of the paper in which movie executives lamented their bad decision making and nobody even once mentioned piracy as a reason that movies are not selling as many tickets.
Apparently, it has finally happened. No matter how loudly they said it and how many times they said it, the movie industry wasn’t able to make it true – and now they have to own up to the fact that the numbers don’t support them.
October 5th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
Hollywood is only to blame. There are crappy theaters, too.
But honestly, the idea that millions of people were staying away from the summer movies because they’d rather spend practically forever to download crappy pirated versions, or get even worse copies off the street, and not because the movies in question for the large part were really, really bad…well, it’s really just silly, and I think the studios know they weren’t fooling anybody.