Movie biz to recession: Bring it on.
At least that’s how the theater owners feel.
“In five of the last seven recession years going back to 1965, the box office went up,” said Patrick Corcoran, director of media and research for the National Association of Theatre Owners.
That includes 2001, when the box office rose by almost 9 percent (about $657 million) over 2000. Statisticians no doubt would point out that five occurrences in a seven-year sample are not necessarily meaningful. A movie fan no doubt would say, “Yeah, but what were the big movies in those years?”
The top five box-office grossers in 2001: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “Shrek,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Rush Hour 2.”
The top five box-office grossers in 2000: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” “Cast Away,” “Mission: Impossible II,” “Gladiator,” “What Women Want.”
There’s your answer.
Still, the movie folks — at least those on the ticket-selling side of the equation — say they have less of a reason than others to sweat out a down economy. As much as people complain about movie ticket prices, they’ve increased far less over the years than, say, Cubs tickets or most other forms of entertainment.
According to the theater owners group’s statistics, an average movie ticket price in 1977 was $2.23, which, adjusted for inflation, would translate to $7.63 in 2007. Yet 2007’s actual average ticket price was $6.88.
“People cut back on a lot of big-ticket things,” Corcoran said, “but they still need to get out of the house, so they go out to the cheap, reliable entertainment.”
Whether Chicago-area families consider $10 movie tickets to be “cheap” may be another story, but this year’s box-office numbers, off 3 percent from last year before the opening of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” aren’t yet revealing any trends.
The bigger picture is how the country’s financial woes are affecting the moviemaking business, given how much Hollywood has come to rely on outside funding for expensive projects.
“Hollywood is much more inextricably linked with Wall Street and the world of finance than it has ever been,” said Dade Hayes, New York bureau chief for the entertainment trade publication Variety. “It’s no longer these deep-pocketed, family-run companies. It’s a vast network of hedge funds and private equity funds and film funds. So when you have a credit crunch, when you have currency issues like you do now, it does take deals longer to close.”
So caution and wariness are in the air, despite the domestic box office’s hitting an all-time high of $9.63 billion in 2007. Dealmaking was down at the Cannes and Sundance Film Festivals, and the squeeze has been felt on the set of David O. Russell’s “Nailed,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel, which shut down twice in recent weeks because of disputes over Capitol Films’ ability to pay its cast and crew.
Meanwhile, Warner Brothers recently pulled the plug on its two specialty-film divisions, Warner Independent Pictures (“March of the Penguins,” “Good Night, and Good Luck”) and Picturehouse (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “A Prairie Home Companion”), after dismantling its subsidiary New Line Cinema.
It’s an open question whether Warner’s fleeing the dependent-indie business is a sign of the economic climate or just evidence of a studio with little interest in or aptitude for selling small movies.
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mcaro@tribune.com
