The moviegoing story of 2009 so far is just how much more of it there has been than in recent years. Over the Presidents’ Day weekend, the box office tally was nearly one-third higher than it had been in 2008, and that tracks with the year as a whole against previous years. This is a cultural signpost of some significance. The movie audience, like the audiences for all the older and more conventional forms of popular entertainment, has been in slow but steady decline for a decade now. (Of course, it’s been in decline pretty much since 1946, when 90 million people went to the movies every week, but that’s a different story.)
People always answer the question about the disappearing movie audience with the same stock reply they give to everything: The computer did it. Or rather, the computer chip, the near-magical object that gives laptops and Nintendo Wiis alike their unprecedented oomph. This is far too simple an explanation. The fact is that there was an explosion of leisure-time activity in the United States over the past decade. Restaurants opened by the tens of thousands. Amusement parks were spiffed up and refurbished. People went on vacation more frequently, and for longer periods of time.
Though a common complaint about the movies, especially from parents of young children, is that the cost of ticket and popcorn and babysitter would run to $50 for a night out at the multiplex, that amount of money stopped seeming outrageous at some point during the take-out-a-second-mortgage-on-your-house-to-pay-for-a-week-at-Disney World craze. In the competition for leisure time and dollars, movies might actually have come to seem like a cheap date, nothing special, and possibly a letdown when there were so many other things you could be doing with your time.
It is surely no coincidence, comrade, that the huge uptick in moviegoing matches up almost precisely with the national realization that the economy is in disastrous shape and that there is a potential threat to the future prosperity of many, if not most, American families. No one is going on vacation. The restaurants that opened by the thousands are closing by the thousands.
What’s left? Movie theaters. It’s around 20 bucks for two people, eat dinner before you go, and you know what? You can sneak your own popcorn inside in a tote bag; the babysitter’s rates are probably lower than they were, too. In a great deflation, people are going for a deflated pleasure.
Meanwhile, another important factor in American moviegoing is about to change: The number of movies made is on the verge of collapse. By one estimate I’ve seen, three times as many movies were made in the English language in 2007 as in 1987. In New York City, 573 films were released in 2008. The result: Every Friday in the middle years of this decade as many as 10 new films would open. And if they failed to make a sufficient amount of money in the first 10 hours of their release, they were effectively removed from distribution in a matter of days and consigned to oblivion so that the next 10 films could open the following Friday.
That’s over. Hollywood is going to undergo a radical simplification during the next few years, and so will the independent film market. The number of films released will decline by at least a third, and probably more, this year, and will be down by 50 percent in 2010.
The economic logic is inescapable. Hollywood no longer has hedge-fund capital to burn. The kinds of tricky European tax shelters that allowed studios to make movies for almost nothing (detailed brilliantly in Edward Jay Epstein’s The Big Picture) are going to be closed. Even Steven Spielberg was forced to go shopping for new backers in India, and when those backers went broke, he came back to the United States and found that his old friends at Universal had lost their stomach for doing business with him.
Moviegoers are already indicating they want to be given a chance to see movies over a period of weeks; that is what the enduring sales figures for Gran Torino, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and Taken indicate. None of these movies is a barn-burner, but they offer a moviegoer a decent couple of hours of entertainment, and don’t give him a hard time.
Here’s another signpost to watch for: If the kids from High School Musical start singing “We’re in the Money” in pig Latin, the way Ginger Rogers did in Gold Diggers of 1933, then we’ll know we’re really in the soup.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
