Between 2018 and 2022, movie theater attendance dropped in half, and I do not want to hear any excuses about the pandemic.
People will go to the theater to see a movie that appeals to them. Spider-Man: No Way Home proved this last year. Top Gun: Maverick proved it this year. Avatar: Way of the Water is proving it right now. And those are just the blockbusters.
People also crept out of their homes to see Everything Everywhere All at Once ($69M), Elvis ($151M), Uncharted ($148M), Nope ($123M), Where the Crawdads Sing ($90M), The Woman King ($67M), Free Guy ($122M), The Lost City ($105M), and Ticket to Paradise ($68M).
In other words, blaming streaming or the China Flu on the collapse of the movie business is anti-science, so please do shut up.
The only difference between 2018 and 2022 is appeal.
In 2018, individual titles and the idea of going to the movies in general (I’ll talk more about this below) appealed to people.
That’s what’s changed.
That’s what’s over.
That’s what’s dead.
“In the last four years, theatrical attendance has declined by about 50 percent,” reports IndieWire. Here’s the breakdown…
As for calculating that attendance drop: The last full pre-Covid year of 2019 generated a domestic box-office total of $11.3 billion, down from $11.9 billion in 2018.
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Based on today’s admission costs, the 2018 domestic box-office total would be over $14 billion. Back out of the totals to calculate admissions, and we reach a dire conclusion: Theatrical attendance in 2022 is about 52 percent of 2018.
This dreadful year of 2022 was so bad it under-performed even the “weakest” of expectations:
Box office for 2022 ended a little under $7.4 billion domestic, with $26 billion worldwide. That fell far short of the year’s weakest projections, a consensus first stated in December 2021 by financial analyst Gower Street and repeated widely in the media: $9.2 billion domestic and $33.2 billion worldwide. Last March during a quarterly financial call, AMC Theatres CEO Adam Aron said “We are quite bullish that for the full calendar year of 2022 the industry box office could be nearly double that of 2021″ — that is, about $8.8 billion domestic. On those bases, we have shortfall of somewhere between 20 and 25 percent.
So what really changed between 2018 and 2022?
Was there streaming in 2018 and 2022? Yep.
Was there a pandemic in 2018 and 2022? Nope.
So what was it?
As you can see above, based on actual hard box office numbers, even in 2022, people will flood movie theaters if they want to see the movie. Even with streaming available to them and a virus circulating, people will still go to the movies if the title appeals to them.
So isn’t that what changed? Isn’t appeal the only true difference between 2018 and 2022?
Why, yes — yes, it is!
Duh.
That I’m the only one stating this fact does not make me some sort of insightful genius. All it proves is that I’m not beholden to the entertainment industry for access or advertising dollars, which means I can tell the truth, which means I don’t have to embarrass myself to earn a living.
We all know what changed between 2018 and 2022: the woke virus.
The woke virus is killing entertainment and not just the movies. Have you seen the stock price of THE FUTURE, of these dreadful streaming services that are literally spending a hundred billion — with a “B” — dollars to produce giant piles of billion-dollar crap called “their content?”
Those of us of a certain age still remember when “going to the movies” was a thing.
What I mean is this: We didn’t say, Let’s go see this or that title. Instead, we said, Hey, let’s go to the movies.
Believe it or not, there was a time when Hollywood was so in touch with the American public; we went to the movies to go to the movies. We decided to go to the movies, and only then would we look at the newspaper to see what was playing. From there, and always excited, we set off to see whatever appealed to us the most. We went to the movies.
You see, there was a time when going to the movies was not a losing gamble of your hard-earned money and precious free time. Why? Because Hollywood was still in touch with the customers. Hollywood’s product wasn’t as smug and elitist as Hollywood. Hollywood didn’t lecture, hector, badger, and insult us. Instead, Hollywood entertained, enlightened, and inspired.
Oh, and if parents paid attention to the rating system and the very idea of a “children’s movie,” they could also trust Hollywood to look out for our kids. Imagine that, a time without homosexuality and transvestites in cartoons!
Bottom line: we don’t trust Hollywood anymore, nor should we. To begin with, Hollywood’s hatred and hostility towards us is so pronounced it has undermined the art and turned it into a sick hybrid of leftist-corporate conformity — a dull, boorish, and silly thing that seeks to alter human nature into one thing rather than explore the endless universe of the human experience. In other words, it’s a lie. Art can be many, many things, but it can never lie.
“Hey, let’s go to the movies” is now met with the same spit take as, “It’s true. I saw it on CNN.”
What a shame.
The greatest form of art ever conceived has been annihilated by nepotism, commerce, fear, immaturity, perversity, conformity, propaganda, and everything but what makes art art: individual expression.
Hollywood’s already lost half its movie audience and is losing its backside on its lousy streaming services… Will anyone who can do something about it ever step up and tell the truth about why this is happening? They all know why. Someone just has to have the courage to say it.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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