Quit Your Bitchin!
May. 27th, 2005 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenAn article in the New York Times has finally gotten around to addressing this supposed disaster and imminent collapse of Hollywood known as the theater attendance slump. Simply, we, as a society, don't go to the movies as much as we used to any more. There are exceptions, notably Star Wars in this article, and other than movies like it, ones that people have to see now-now-now, people are blase about attending movies in the theaters. Many causes are looked at--video game popularity on the rise, increased internet trafficking, home theater improvements--and nothing is resolved.
Let me tell you why people don't go to the movies. One fucking word: expense. These days, the cheapest ticket in a city like New York is, or I should say was $9.00 (the cheap theater I know of has raised their price to $9.50 apparently). So, your average family of four pays $36 before the kids start whining about popcorn and soda and bringing that price instantly up to $50. That's not an exaggeration either. Sodas, large ones, cost $4 easy, as does a large popcorn. Make that two sodas and a popcorn and a $2.50-3.50 candy bar/bag, and you've got your $50. Fifty bucks for a movie the parents probably aren't interested in because it has to be kid-appropriate is a lot of money for them to be bored, sticky, and uncomfortable. And don't forget the ads--pay $50 to be bombarded with louder, more obnoxious commercials than you would with your TV at home, and it's little wonder families are abandoning the theater (these ads are terrible for everyone because they're inescapable if you don't want to miss a preview, and because you paid to see them!).
Of course, you could leave the kids at home, pay a mere $18 for the tickets, $8 for soda and popcorn, and then another $30-40 for a sitter. You'd see the movie you want, and if it turned out to be any good, maybe you wouldn't mind the $70-80 price tag. No guarantee about the movie or the company though.
But what about your average 18-to-24 year old, usually male, that is a member of the coveted monied-but-not-burdened-with-familial-responsibility demographic? Cost there shouldn't be a factor too much, right? Wrong. Yes, they're interested in video games and the internet more than they used to be, but that doesn't stop them from movie indulgence. What stops them is a practicality that we've bred into the younger generation by making them a bit cut-throat and forcing financial (among other types) responsibility on them at earlier and earlier ages. We praise prodigies who can make millions by 16. Is it any surprise that your average teenager will look at a $9 movie, see a $9 DVD two years down the road, and chose the latter?
Forget that, forget ANY OTHER MEDIUM EXISTING, and expense will still drive away people who don't have to pay babysitters or buy junk food at the price of a full meal at Fridays. Okay, you're young, you're not making much money, but hey $10 for two hours (roughly) isn't a bad rate to pay for entertainment. Congratulations, now you have to make sure you get a ticket. With the rise of Fandango, Moviephone, and such of their ilk, the 'convenience' of being assured a seat and not making an expensive trip out for no reason has really just added another fee to an already over-priced habit. You want to be sure you'll get into Revenge of the Sith? Better buy your ticket on Fandango and pretend not to notice that the ticket that's already way too much money is now a way too high $12 (average in NYC) or $11 (average 'cheap'). So, what started out as a social gathering, getting together your like-minded 18-to-24s, has become an expense, pure and simple.
Other inconveniences--not finding seats together, people talking, a crappy movie--really pale, in my mind, to the hatefully mercenary up-front costs of attending movies these days. Don't kid yourselves, revisionists: movies today are no better or worse than they ever were. More expensive, though, that they are (great, I'm talking like Yoda; I must be wise). Bad old movies just aren't given shiny new DVDs. They're either exiled to an increasingly marginal VHS network or are sold for $1 a piece at places like Wal-Mart. Ask my mother, she could find you some doosies, and some with famous people, even (movies that not even Leonard Maltin or the IMDB knows about).
Movie quality is not the issue. I read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything in which he repeatedly mentioned turning points in science where people thought that that was it. Close up the labs, hang up the white coats, break the beakers and try to neutralize those acids with those bases on your way out. Science was done. Everything had been learned. People do this with every medium. After moving pictures were invented, I'm sure people thought that live action was dead, but don't we still pay $100-a-seat to see The Lion King (itself based on a movie)? And sound? Sound was 'the end' of silent pictures, but now we place a greater value on silence when it is a choice, and the same is true of color. Some day, we'll have truly believable all-digital actors, voice and face both. I still doubt they'll replace all actors with them. Movies are magic. They still have the capability to amaze. The price, not necessarily the product, is the problem.
It's about time to make an essayist's 'idiot paragraph,' in which I have to concede that maybe those statistics quoted in The New York Times have a point. Sure, they do. The improvements to home theater quality and Ti-Vo have made movies a less attractive option than ever before. Why go through the hassle when you can get that DVD six months down the road? Let's not forget or ignore the impact of DVD, either. I guess you can blame The Matrix for this. It was the first DVD to sell a million copies, the first movie whose visuals were worth getting the improved resolution over VHS, and one that made the other advantage of DVD--that of instant gratification--much more public than it had been. DVD is a powerful motivator for people to abandon the theaters. There used to be an arrangement whereby movies enjoyed theatrical releases of lengths based on popularity (as the hellish months under the reign of King Cameron and his hideous movie about a fucking boat should jog your memories). Then movies were packaged into VHS and available for rental. It was a handy system, guaranteed to make money for the rental people who could catch the instant-gratification watchers on the rental and late fees. Some months later, they'd sell the copies they bought for $100 a pop for $20 or so and people had their movie.
DVDs changed that, and as a consequence, we've witnessed one blue-and-yellow chain store supplant another: Best Buy is the new Blockbuster. Movies still go through theatrical releases, sure, but when they leave and have that packaging grace period, they emerge with VHS still for rent but DVD ready to buy. And a booming economy of the late 90s encouraged the switch to DVD players (which were coming down in price) in time to allow this practice to flourish. Nowadays, people don't buy theater systems unless they have DVD players, and that usually includes computers. DVD sales out pace ticket sales by billions, maybe four or five times what theaters take in. Shouldn't we put the blame on DVD's door?
The answer is still no. For one, the popularity of DVD means that just about any schlub movie makes it onto the "New This Week!" rack, and movies are indistinguishable when shrunk down to little 8 by 6 packages unless they had some remarkable graphic that separates them (for instance, you'll probably be able to tell which DVD is that for Sin City when it comes out, but Sideways is pretty non-distinct). Best Buy has taken to showing trailers so you'll know what movie to watch, and that's why the power comes back to my argument: people want to watch movies before they own them pretty much most of the time. That's why Blockbuster is not completely out of business and why Netflix has the popularity the theater chains can only dream of. Yes, that new Troy DVD is only $20 and it has all those nifty special features. However, why pay $20 for it when it could be (and mostly is) crap? If you could have paid $5 to rent it, or less with a Netflix account, or have seen it on the grand theater-sized screen (which would help show up its assets--namely huge battle scenes that won't look as good on anything smaller than 60 inches) for $8?
Ah, gotcha. You would have seen it in the theater if it were only $8, and that's why expense wins out. Because owning a movie that's crap is still less expensive and less of a nuisance than the aforementioned $50-80 trip for a family or couple with sitter or $12+food for a single person. When the cost of attending the theater comes anywhere close to a DVD--and it's not only close, it's there, people--why bother with something you can only see once? It's as mercenary as the theaters' tactics, only now it's being turned on them. Yes, DVD is a problem, but it might not be if movies weren't prohibitively expensive in the first place.
So, what's the solution? That's what Hollywood wants to know, apparently. I don't think I need to tell anyone that the simple solution, after all this, is just to make things less expensive. Stop paying actors $20 million for The Grinch Who Stole Christmas would be a start. Quit paying studio heads as much as they do. Theater chains should charge less for everything, and make it up by being charged less per showing of the film.
That's the 'simple' answer. Is it the feasible one? Absolutely not, nor is it a bunch of [insert adjective] answers: it's not the easy, likely, popular, ever-going-to-happen one. With great inflation comes great expense (sorry, Uncle Ben, I had to). What can they do then? What movie theaters have always done: up the ante. As I said before, new innovations have often been met with wails of doom. The television, and re-runs of old movies was supposed to be the doom of movie theaters. So what did theaters do? They innovated right along side. They invented smell-o-ramas and equally ridiculous things (though I would have loved to have been in the theater for The Tingler and the electrified seats), but they also hit on a few concepts that are so intrinsic to our experience now, we scoff if a film doesn't have it. Ways to bring people away from the TV that worked and stuck included wider negatives (what we know as 'widescreen' on DVD and why theater screens are eloganted rectangles versus squarer tv sets); they had 3D; movies came with surround sound and then dolby and eventually dolby digital; there were previews of new movies to whet the appetite and give the audience an incentive to come to the theater rather than relying on word of mouth. I could go on and on (and since I've been doing that, I'll choose instead to wrap this up).
The 'true' answer is they need not to sit around and whine. Nobody feels bad for Mr. Loews CEO and his chain losing money, even if it is their 100th anniversary. Bitching never solved anything, no matter how much better it made the person/objectified corporation feel. If video games and DVD and the internet and improved technology are the cutting edge, what lies beyond? Movie theater owners need to find a way to communicate with their distracted and money-tight patrons. If lowering the price is not an option, improving quality has to be. We're a pretty rational society when it comes to our money; we'd pay more if the value were better for the dollar (part of the problem with the Super-Size Me-type food hysteria and the popularity of Sam's Club and Costco). Make my dollar worth more at the theater, and I'll be there more often.
Again, a simple-sounding solution that I can already hear objections to. To those whiners, I say this: I offer you not a solution but a challenge. Perhaps movie theaters are on their way out this time. Perhaps, despite years of related and direct archival evidence, movie theaters are history, dinosaurs lumbering around past their time (hey, evolution's a bitch, ain't it?). If such, nothing could save them. But this woe-is-me crap, the constant analysis that tells them the facts and leaves them in the dark about the truth, isn't going to cut it. Evolve or be left behind. Fare thee well, young amoeboid Moviesius theaterarus. I'm not sure you'll be missed at this rate.
Let me tell you why people don't go to the movies. One fucking word: expense. These days, the cheapest ticket in a city like New York is, or I should say was $9.00 (the cheap theater I know of has raised their price to $9.50 apparently). So, your average family of four pays $36 before the kids start whining about popcorn and soda and bringing that price instantly up to $50. That's not an exaggeration either. Sodas, large ones, cost $4 easy, as does a large popcorn. Make that two sodas and a popcorn and a $2.50-3.50 candy bar/bag, and you've got your $50. Fifty bucks for a movie the parents probably aren't interested in because it has to be kid-appropriate is a lot of money for them to be bored, sticky, and uncomfortable. And don't forget the ads--pay $50 to be bombarded with louder, more obnoxious commercials than you would with your TV at home, and it's little wonder families are abandoning the theater (these ads are terrible for everyone because they're inescapable if you don't want to miss a preview, and because you paid to see them!).
Of course, you could leave the kids at home, pay a mere $18 for the tickets, $8 for soda and popcorn, and then another $30-40 for a sitter. You'd see the movie you want, and if it turned out to be any good, maybe you wouldn't mind the $70-80 price tag. No guarantee about the movie or the company though.
But what about your average 18-to-24 year old, usually male, that is a member of the coveted monied-but-not-burdened-with-familial-responsibility demographic? Cost there shouldn't be a factor too much, right? Wrong. Yes, they're interested in video games and the internet more than they used to be, but that doesn't stop them from movie indulgence. What stops them is a practicality that we've bred into the younger generation by making them a bit cut-throat and forcing financial (among other types) responsibility on them at earlier and earlier ages. We praise prodigies who can make millions by 16. Is it any surprise that your average teenager will look at a $9 movie, see a $9 DVD two years down the road, and chose the latter?
Forget that, forget ANY OTHER MEDIUM EXISTING, and expense will still drive away people who don't have to pay babysitters or buy junk food at the price of a full meal at Fridays. Okay, you're young, you're not making much money, but hey $10 for two hours (roughly) isn't a bad rate to pay for entertainment. Congratulations, now you have to make sure you get a ticket. With the rise of Fandango, Moviephone, and such of their ilk, the 'convenience' of being assured a seat and not making an expensive trip out for no reason has really just added another fee to an already over-priced habit. You want to be sure you'll get into Revenge of the Sith? Better buy your ticket on Fandango and pretend not to notice that the ticket that's already way too much money is now a way too high $12 (average in NYC) or $11 (average 'cheap'). So, what started out as a social gathering, getting together your like-minded 18-to-24s, has become an expense, pure and simple.
Other inconveniences--not finding seats together, people talking, a crappy movie--really pale, in my mind, to the hatefully mercenary up-front costs of attending movies these days. Don't kid yourselves, revisionists: movies today are no better or worse than they ever were. More expensive, though, that they are (great, I'm talking like Yoda; I must be wise). Bad old movies just aren't given shiny new DVDs. They're either exiled to an increasingly marginal VHS network or are sold for $1 a piece at places like Wal-Mart. Ask my mother, she could find you some doosies, and some with famous people, even (movies that not even Leonard Maltin or the IMDB knows about).
Movie quality is not the issue. I read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything in which he repeatedly mentioned turning points in science where people thought that that was it. Close up the labs, hang up the white coats, break the beakers and try to neutralize those acids with those bases on your way out. Science was done. Everything had been learned. People do this with every medium. After moving pictures were invented, I'm sure people thought that live action was dead, but don't we still pay $100-a-seat to see The Lion King (itself based on a movie)? And sound? Sound was 'the end' of silent pictures, but now we place a greater value on silence when it is a choice, and the same is true of color. Some day, we'll have truly believable all-digital actors, voice and face both. I still doubt they'll replace all actors with them. Movies are magic. They still have the capability to amaze. The price, not necessarily the product, is the problem.
It's about time to make an essayist's 'idiot paragraph,' in which I have to concede that maybe those statistics quoted in The New York Times have a point. Sure, they do. The improvements to home theater quality and Ti-Vo have made movies a less attractive option than ever before. Why go through the hassle when you can get that DVD six months down the road? Let's not forget or ignore the impact of DVD, either. I guess you can blame The Matrix for this. It was the first DVD to sell a million copies, the first movie whose visuals were worth getting the improved resolution over VHS, and one that made the other advantage of DVD--that of instant gratification--much more public than it had been. DVD is a powerful motivator for people to abandon the theaters. There used to be an arrangement whereby movies enjoyed theatrical releases of lengths based on popularity (as the hellish months under the reign of King Cameron and his hideous movie about a fucking boat should jog your memories). Then movies were packaged into VHS and available for rental. It was a handy system, guaranteed to make money for the rental people who could catch the instant-gratification watchers on the rental and late fees. Some months later, they'd sell the copies they bought for $100 a pop for $20 or so and people had their movie.
DVDs changed that, and as a consequence, we've witnessed one blue-and-yellow chain store supplant another: Best Buy is the new Blockbuster. Movies still go through theatrical releases, sure, but when they leave and have that packaging grace period, they emerge with VHS still for rent but DVD ready to buy. And a booming economy of the late 90s encouraged the switch to DVD players (which were coming down in price) in time to allow this practice to flourish. Nowadays, people don't buy theater systems unless they have DVD players, and that usually includes computers. DVD sales out pace ticket sales by billions, maybe four or five times what theaters take in. Shouldn't we put the blame on DVD's door?
The answer is still no. For one, the popularity of DVD means that just about any schlub movie makes it onto the "New This Week!" rack, and movies are indistinguishable when shrunk down to little 8 by 6 packages unless they had some remarkable graphic that separates them (for instance, you'll probably be able to tell which DVD is that for Sin City when it comes out, but Sideways is pretty non-distinct). Best Buy has taken to showing trailers so you'll know what movie to watch, and that's why the power comes back to my argument: people want to watch movies before they own them pretty much most of the time. That's why Blockbuster is not completely out of business and why Netflix has the popularity the theater chains can only dream of. Yes, that new Troy DVD is only $20 and it has all those nifty special features. However, why pay $20 for it when it could be (and mostly is) crap? If you could have paid $5 to rent it, or less with a Netflix account, or have seen it on the grand theater-sized screen (which would help show up its assets--namely huge battle scenes that won't look as good on anything smaller than 60 inches) for $8?
Ah, gotcha. You would have seen it in the theater if it were only $8, and that's why expense wins out. Because owning a movie that's crap is still less expensive and less of a nuisance than the aforementioned $50-80 trip for a family or couple with sitter or $12+food for a single person. When the cost of attending the theater comes anywhere close to a DVD--and it's not only close, it's there, people--why bother with something you can only see once? It's as mercenary as the theaters' tactics, only now it's being turned on them. Yes, DVD is a problem, but it might not be if movies weren't prohibitively expensive in the first place.
So, what's the solution? That's what Hollywood wants to know, apparently. I don't think I need to tell anyone that the simple solution, after all this, is just to make things less expensive. Stop paying actors $20 million for The Grinch Who Stole Christmas would be a start. Quit paying studio heads as much as they do. Theater chains should charge less for everything, and make it up by being charged less per showing of the film.
That's the 'simple' answer. Is it the feasible one? Absolutely not, nor is it a bunch of [insert adjective] answers: it's not the easy, likely, popular, ever-going-to-happen one. With great inflation comes great expense (sorry, Uncle Ben, I had to). What can they do then? What movie theaters have always done: up the ante. As I said before, new innovations have often been met with wails of doom. The television, and re-runs of old movies was supposed to be the doom of movie theaters. So what did theaters do? They innovated right along side. They invented smell-o-ramas and equally ridiculous things (though I would have loved to have been in the theater for The Tingler and the electrified seats), but they also hit on a few concepts that are so intrinsic to our experience now, we scoff if a film doesn't have it. Ways to bring people away from the TV that worked and stuck included wider negatives (what we know as 'widescreen' on DVD and why theater screens are eloganted rectangles versus squarer tv sets); they had 3D; movies came with surround sound and then dolby and eventually dolby digital; there were previews of new movies to whet the appetite and give the audience an incentive to come to the theater rather than relying on word of mouth. I could go on and on (and since I've been doing that, I'll choose instead to wrap this up).
The 'true' answer is they need not to sit around and whine. Nobody feels bad for Mr. Loews CEO and his chain losing money, even if it is their 100th anniversary. Bitching never solved anything, no matter how much better it made the person/objectified corporation feel. If video games and DVD and the internet and improved technology are the cutting edge, what lies beyond? Movie theater owners need to find a way to communicate with their distracted and money-tight patrons. If lowering the price is not an option, improving quality has to be. We're a pretty rational society when it comes to our money; we'd pay more if the value were better for the dollar (part of the problem with the Super-Size Me-type food hysteria and the popularity of Sam's Club and Costco). Make my dollar worth more at the theater, and I'll be there more often.
Again, a simple-sounding solution that I can already hear objections to. To those whiners, I say this: I offer you not a solution but a challenge. Perhaps movie theaters are on their way out this time. Perhaps, despite years of related and direct archival evidence, movie theaters are history, dinosaurs lumbering around past their time (hey, evolution's a bitch, ain't it?). If such, nothing could save them. But this woe-is-me crap, the constant analysis that tells them the facts and leaves them in the dark about the truth, isn't going to cut it. Evolve or be left behind. Fare thee well, young amoeboid Moviesius theaterarus. I'm not sure you'll be missed at this rate.
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-27 06:02 pm (UTC)