It's one of the most puzzling conundrums facing modern society, right up there with cold fusion and the meaning of life: where have all the audiences gone?
As the movie industry braces itself for another year of sub-par box office returns and empty cineplexes, people are starting to point fingers and scratch heads. But like most pop culture phenomena, the solution can't be found in any one place.
"If you ask anyone in the industry, they'll probably blame someone else," said New York Times movie reviewer and film scene veteran A. O. Scott. "You know, if you talk to filmmakers, they'll blame the studios; if you talk to studio production departments, they'll blame studio marketing departments."
So get ready, Mr. DeMille, as the Daily takes a close-up look at the decline of the movie industry: how it started, what it means, and most importantly, how it's going to be fixed.
It coulda been a contender
Who doesn't love spending a Friday night at the movies? If the sticky floors, exorbitant ticket prices, and gaggles of 13-year-old girls outfitted with annoying cell phone ring tones are too much of a buzz-kill for some audience members, surely a $6 tub of popcorn and kiddie pool-sized Diet Coke will cure the movie blues, right?
Wrong. According to Entertainment Weekly's 2005 Moviegoers Poll, 65 percent of respondents said that they go to movies less frequently than they did five years ago, citing high ticket fees and bad manners of fellow viewers as the top two reasons for their hiatus.
"Going to the movies, going to the theater, is no longer as pleasant an experience as it once was," said Boston Herald film critic James Verniere. "Once upon a time, we had these movie palaces, places that were clean where the crowds felt obliged to be courteous and orderly." Looks like that's one fairy tale that won't end happily ever after.
But if people aren't going to the theaters, where are they getting their movie fix? The answer is a lot closer to home than one might have guessed.
"I think older people are increasingly getting turned off by the movie-going experience and getting turned on to watching movies on DVD at home," Verniere said. "As the TV screens get larger and the entertainment systems become more sophisticated, they can, in many cases, probably produce just as good a film-going experience at home as they can in the theater."
With DVD sales at an all-time high, the 20 year home entertainment revolution that began with dinosaurish VHS tapes has reached its pinnacle: last year, home video sales soundly drubbed Hollywood's $9.2 billion box office revenue with a whopping $24.1 billion in sales.
And the DVD craze isn't the only thing keeping studio execs up all night.
"Now, there are so many really appealing competing technologies," New York Times movie editor Michael Cieply said. "The simple one is video games ... it's a different quality of experience, it's interactive. Instead of being the leading technology, movies are now trading on trailing technologies and competing with things that are newer and somewhat more appealing.
"And that's starting to eat up little segments - or sometimes big segments - of the viewing public," Cieply said. "Notoriously, lately, the biggest drop-offs have been seen among young men; young men under the age of 25 seem to be drifting away from movies... that's really what they [the studios] need to get back."
Frankly, my dear, they don't give a damn
Of course, there are some who say that sending out a distress call for the movie industry would be akin to yelling "Fire!" in a not-so-crowded theater.
There's no denying that 2005 has not been kind to Hollywood. Whether the fare is grade-A or ghastly, audiences just aren't going to the movies, and many films end up succumbing to the "Cinderella Man" syndrome, a summer release which, despite overwhelming critical acclaim, has made back only 70 percent of its estimated $88 million budget to date.
Some film experts, however, think it's too early to blow the whistle.
"I'm not so certain that this is such a calamity," Verniere said. "All businesses have cycles, and then this year may just be a slight downturn. That's not to say that they [studios] aren't making money hand over fist; they're still making plenty of money! So I wouldn't be too alarmed by the trend."
And while some studios are pushing the panic button in response to this year's unfavorable comparison with last year's box office totals, Scott points out the flaw in drawing such a negative conclusion.
"When you really look at the numbers as ... aggregate box office numbers for the years, and you correct for a few factors, it's not clear how much of a slump there really is," he said. "One of the problems, for example, with comparing this year to last year is [that] last year, there was 'Passion of the Christ,' which was a huge and kind of novel box office success coming at a time of the year when there's usually not that kind of a hit. And there was also 'Spiderman II,' so there were a lot of big movies that may have inflated last year's box office total, so that coming down this year is a little bit of a correction."
So are the industry bigwigs getting their panties in a bunch over nothing? Is this just another phase of the take-home revolution, and will movies rise from disappointment yet again, as surely as Martin Scorcese on Oscar night?
The general consensus is that Hollywood as a whole will do just fine - $24 billion in sales are insurance enough. Yet there is potential for a future scenario in which, as Steven Spielberg once told Entertainment Weekly, going to the movies becomes as rare and as exclusive an event as seeing a Broadway show.
"I think," said Cieply, "there's a very delicate turning point occurring here in which if they don't reverse the current trends, the box office, which has been the window to all these other ways of making money, is in danger of entering permanent decline."
Make us an offer we can't refuse
Competition is not unfamiliar territory for theaters. "The movie studios were running around like chickens without heads when television was introduced," Verniere said. "And they were right to a large extent; people did start watching TV and stopped going to the movies in large numbers."
But just like Scarlett O'Hara rising from the ashes of Tara, the movie industry rolled with the punches and retaliated with innovations like CinemaScope to enhance the cinematic experience and win back its jaded audiences.
So what exactly is going to give the movie business that shot of adrenaline?
"I think that if the trend is gonna reverse, it really is going to fall more on the executives than anybody in the industry," said Cieply. He notes that such radical ideas as 3D films are being tossed around as a means to set the multiplex experience apart from the sofa.
This wouldn't be your typical "hokey" red-and-green glasses deal, Cieply said, but "so believable a 3D experience that Darth Vader comes up and taps you on the shoulder."
But aside from all the fancy solutions that are being discussed, Scott proposes a more organic impetus for a movie-going renaissance. "No matter what kind of plasma TV and Dolby hookup or whatever you have, there's still something about going to the theater that is unique."
You had us at "Hello"
"In a way, it's simple: if [Hollywood] make movies that people want to see, people will go see those movies," Scott said. "But obviously, figuring out what the audience is going to want to see...is a big challenge."
And here's where things get sticky. Scott acknowledges that studios are often unwilling to back a project with uncertain market appeal.
"Especially when you're talking about large studio movies, one of the reasons that I think they get more and more cautious is that the budgets are now up over $100 million routinely - and the marketing costs are often double that - and then that means that you have to do enormous business to turn a profit."
That, in turn, exacerbates the dilemma, Scott said. "Often, you water down the product [as if] to say, 'How can we make a movie that everybody's gonna want to see?' And you end up with a movie that no one particularly likes or cares about."
That conflict has been a perennial problem in Hollywood. Directing titan Francis Ford Coppola once lamented that studios wanted "risk-free" films, a mission that he thought was inherently flawed. "With any sort of art," Coppola said, "you have to take risks. Not taking risks in art is like not having sex and then expecting there to be children."
So if gambling is to be the name of the game, how should studios rig the deck in favor of boosting movie attendance?
"I think, in a way," said Scott, "the studios can please the audience best by not worrying so much, by not trying to micro-manage the audience's response."
Keeping it simple was what won Nancy Stern Winters (J '86) and her sister, Lisa Stern Lax (J '86), the studio backing to make their much-hyped documentary, "Emmanuel's Gift" (which opens October 21).
"What's interesting," said Stern Winters, "is that when we first started doing 'Emmanuel's Gift,' and we told people that we were doing this movie about a kid from Africa - a disabled kid from Africa - their first response was, 'Ugh, that's not gonna sell; you're not going to sell that commercially.' And we had to figure out a way to make a story about a kid from Africa commercial."
How did they do it? "By exuding passion and making people fall in love with a character," said Stern Winters. "He wasn't a character who had one leg; he wasn't a character who was a black kid from Africa. He was a great character, and he had a strength, and you couldn't help but fall in love with him."
Stick to the basics; Renee Zellweger could have told us that.
If you build it, they will come
For a debate that fosters so little agreement, there is one thing that film experts across the board can agree on: good movies bring good attendance.
"I'm a film critic; I'm just interested in the quality of the movie," Verniere said. "I'm not really that interested in whether or not everybody on earth wants to go see such-and-such a film."
Stern Winters summed it up. "From my point of view, people are striving to fall in love with characters and feel good ... If you make a good story, people want to see it."
Maybe cold fusion is a little trickier than movies after all.
