U.S box office has its worst weekend in 15 years!

[A_C_E]

Shadow1980 said:

Lawlight said:

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.

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.

Shadow, your just...great.