Yes, box office is up this summer, but don’t get comfy
Variety Editor-in-Chief Peter Bart’s Monday column on the surprising health of the summer movie box office entirely misses the point. True, box office is up this summer, but the real story here is with the consolidation of tickets sold among a mere handful of movies.
Both culturally and on an entertainment-industry wide basis, we’re seeing a tectonic change in how Americans consume movies and how many movies the ticket-buying public can support over the course of a year. By taking a look only at the total box office numbers, Bart betrays a provincial perspective, which is surprising from a guy who usually has such a holistic take on the movie business.
Mass culture isn’t going away anytime soon, but it is definitely on a diet. Variety uses Nielsen EDI numbers in its regular reporting on box office numbers, but the problem with Nielsen EDI is that it tracks total revenue rather than number of tickets sold, and that bleeds away any holistic sense of how audience behavior is changing. I tend to look at Box Office Mojo, which does track tickets sold.
It’s a few weeks old, but the PowerPoint deck that I presented at iMedia’s Entertainment Summit gives a nice data overview of how things are changing. You can download it here.
There’s both bad and good news.
The bad news is that the number of opportunities for movie-theater eventness are shrinking, and as the big-industrial movie studio model shrinks we’re going to see a lot of people who are committed to that model lose their jobs as making, marketing and distributing movies becomes less and less cost effective.
So what’s the good news? Given how comparatively cheap digital filmmaking and distribution are, we are looking at some exciting potential: within the next few years we will, I think, see the emergence of an artistic middle class. While there are fewer opportunities for people to become sickeningly rich as the makers of culture (movies, TV, music, books, paintings, etc.), there are more and more opportunities for folks to make a nice living as artists.
But it’s hard to see this potential through the gauzy distractions of the Big Media American Dream where you write that book, that song, that script and are set up for the rest of your life. That dream will still be a reality for some folks, but the number is shrinking. There’s a new dream out there, where you can make videos or music for a living, have that be your full time job, never make it to the big time and still afford a house with a yard and private school for your kids. It’s a new dream worth pursuing, and one that we as a culture should start to make a real topic within our discourse.
The Big Media entertainment industry is set up with a lot of highly paid executives who are talented at getting mass audiences to consume the same products all over the world. But mass culture as a pervasive and fascinating phenomenon has already seen its best days–we’re returning to the kind of local culture that keeps folklorists and ethnographers in business.
If your dream is to drive a Bentley and live in a mansion in Beverly Hills, well, good luck.
But if your dream is to support yourself and your family as an artist and you’re comfortable with a Honda and a nice house in the suburbs, then your future may be a bright one.
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