| Shadow1980 said: Box Office Mojo has inflation-adjusted weekend revenues going back to 1982. There have been many weekends a lot worse than this one. The weekend of Sept. 20-22, 1985 was the absolute worst since 1982. The only real blockbusters running at the time were Back to the Future, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and, to a lesser extent, Cocoon, and they had all been out three months or more at that point. Teen Wolf and Pee Wee's Big Adventure weren't quite blockbusters but still did fairly well but they too had been out for a while at that point. The only movies released within the past month (4 weekends or less before that weekend) were Creator, Plenty, Kiss of the Spider Woman, American Ninja, and Compromising Positions, all of which failed to be hugely successful (Kiss of the Spider Woman, the most successful of those made $41M adjusted on a limited release). And I see the same pattern in other weekends with poor box office showings: it had been a fair number of weeks since the last film with truly big mainstream success had released, with some films that ranged from decent to middling in terms of performance being more recent. Nothing big was released this past weekend. The only real blockbusters that have made $150M or more that are still running and in the top 20 are Dunkirk, Spider-Man, Despicable Me 3, and Wonder Woman (War for the Planet of the Apes may or may not pass he $150M, but isn't too far behind at nearly $143; everything else in the top 20 is way behind PotA and the other big ones), and they've all been out for well over a month (Dunkirk is the most recent, having had its 6th weekend). Everything else is either not a film geared towards mainstream audiences and/or isn't really a big "tent pole" release, except maybe for the Emoji Movie and Valerian, which have proven to be total bombs. Granted, the population is a lot bigger now than in a lot of those other poor weekends, and this weekend was a notable standout for being the worst in a good long while, but given the total desert out there right now, it's no surprise that this weekend was a rough one. In terms of per capita ticket sales, things have been kinda sorta steady since the mid 60s. Movies were obviously a much bigger deal in the pre-TV days, and from the end of WW2 to the early to mid 60s we saw a massive drop. We have been seeing a gradual decline over the 21st century, though, with a roughly 30% drop since 2002.
Maybe because of increased competition from other entertainment options. Maybe it's simply because of what Hollywood is releasing. Maybe it's ticket prices, which, despite them having not increased any when adjusted for inflation since 2010, are still quite a bit more than the average over the past 30-35 years:
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The number of people going to the theatres is decreasing while the population is increasing. The average ticket price is going up every single year - that's what's keeping the numerical value up. Hollywood isn't in crisis - movie theatres are the ones facing a crisis.
