Shadow1980 said:
Hard to say if it's actual number of people, since all we have are grosses and estimated tickets sold based on average prices. We don't know how many individuals made at least one trip to the theater in a given year, or how many of them were repeat visits. But in any case per capita ticket sales have indeed declined since 2002 (see chart from other post), as have total ticket sales:
That's a 16.6% decline. So, even in absolute terms we're seeing fewer tickets despite a growing population. However, I decided to take a look at some different metrics to see if I could discern any detail about what changes in habits moviegoers might be exhibiting. While I did some rounding, I was able to determine that the top 20 movies of 2002 grossed just slightly over $6B adjusted domestically, while in 2016 the top 20 movies combined to around $5.7B, a decline of only about 5%. The top 10 movies of each year showed 2016 down only 1.5% vs. 2002, nearly flat. It's possible that moviegoers are simply reducing their trips and focusing on fewer titles that provide quality entertainment (for a given definition of "quality"). Whenever I have time, I'm going to piece together more detailed charts to see what I come up with. |
That still shows ticket sales today are still higher than they were in 80s and first half of the 90s, even though movie tickets cost waaaaaaay more today.
Plus you have larger foreign markets today like China and India, somehow that Mummy film starring Tom Cruise that everyone said flopped still took in $400 million worldwide from just box office tickets.
Interesting too if you look at the 80s, you can see what presumably is a huge drop-off in theater ticket sales as households started to get VCR players after 1984, but then tickets start to ramp up again as the late 80s/1990s dawn. 1989 in particular, it looks like with Batman + Indiana Jones + Leathal Weapon 2 + Honey I Shrunk the Kids sent box office into a massive boom.
