The Change Mariner

Movie Theaters to Go the Way of Drive-Ins?

SFGate.com:
As one of the four big release dates -- along with Memorial Day, Christmas and New Year's Day -- Thanksgiving week can draw 40 million Americans into theaters, far exceeding the average weekly attendance of 25 million to 30 million, he said.

Impressive as those numbers may sound, the theater industry will sell fewer tickets during this peak week than it did during any seven-day period in the 1920s -- when the U.S. population was just a third of what it is today.

For discerning moviegoers, however, the real story this Thanksgiving isn't what's on the screen. Rather it's the changing nature of the $9 billion theater industry, whose biggest box office days are in the past, and whose future is uncertain in an age of DVDs, 24-hour cable and high-definition television.

"In the 1940s, virtually every person who was old enough to walk and talk went to movies once a week,'' he said. "It was the way the average person was entertained.''

... The 1965 edition of the Film Daily Year Book reveals that in 1922, when the U.S. population was about 106 million, the theater industry sold an average of 40 million tickets per week.

Average weekly attendance peaked at 90 million in the late 1940s, when the U.S. population was about half of what it is today. Then, in the 1950s came television, and theater attendance began to plunge. By the 1960s, weekly ticket sales were below Depression-era levels.

...Syufy said theater owners have raised prices to meet expenses ranging from workers' compensation insurance to the cost of building megaplexes -- where each screen can run anywhere from $750,000 to $1 million, according to some estimates.

...Howard Suber, founding chair of UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television, believes movie theaters may be fighting a losing battle.

"Most people don't want to get out of their houses for anything in American society anymore,'' said Suber, who lumps the moviegoing public into two groups: teenagers dying to get out of the house, and single people on hot dates. He foresees a day when film studios bypass theaters and release new movies via some form of pay-per-view.

"It's quite possible that within our lifetime the megaplex will go the way of the drive-in,'' he said.

...But theater owners say neither they, nor ultimately their patrons, should pay the estimated $100,000-per-screen conversion cost, when Hollywood would be the prime beneficiary of any film-to-digital switch.

Indeed, theater owners see themselves as caught between moviegoers -- who gripe about prices, commercials, even sticky floors -- and moviemakers, who take most of the box office in a film's first few weeks, while producing titles with life expectancies measured, also, in weeks.