While the MPAA continues to moan and complain about piracy hurting them, they also continue to pretend that high ticket prices, long pre-movie advertising commercial times and bad films have anything to do with the current slump the box office is in. But the head of Canada’s biggest theater chain (Cineplex Odeon) knows better than that.
The good folks over at JAM Showbiz recently interviewed the big cheese and he had some interesting things to say about the topic:
The head of Canada’s biggest movie-theatre chain attributed the decline in second-quarter profit, which fell to $242,000 from $8.8 million a year earlier, to a lacklustre bunch of films on tap – especially in comparison with last year..
“Current Hollywood product has not drawn audiences. And although a number of films have had positive prerelease buzz, they have failed to perform at the box office,” Cineplex Galaxy president-CEO Ellis Jacob told analysts Wednesday.
“We believe that product timing and a number of unappealing films in general led to disappointing second-quarter box office. I believe this trend is cyclical and more indicative of poor scripts than anything else,” Jacob said.
At last! Someone in the movie industry who seems to get it! Now if he can just lower the consession stand prices a bit!
Well, duh. If you build it, they will come. If you make shit movies, we’ll stay home.
Ellis Jacob was right to put product timing forward as a factor in the weak pull that movies are exerting for theatres.
There have been a lot of dud movies this year, but still enough good ones to provide a full year’s entertainment.
What we’ve seen though is long gaps of nothin’-going, and quick bursts of good movies treading on each others’ toes. This is not helpful for theatre owners.
Of course, movie sales are unpredictable, so timing is guesswork. But with not too many attractive movies to cover the long year, guessing a good time to release the goodies should have been easier.
No, like I posted over in the Creative Slump page, Holloywood needs to blame themselves for not taking control and innovating new things that theatres can offer that the audience can’t get at home. Thats what 3-D glasses did for movies, it brought more people into the theatre. They need to make fun movies that run along a scent dispurser to run along cetain scenes of the film. Once that comes out, we wouldn’t have that in our homes for years to come, and people will fill the theatre for something new like like. If they have it at home, they will get lazy, rent a movie they havn’t seen in a while, and for the new movie to come out on DVD.
And there are so many other things for the theatre to have, but nobody’s invented anything latley. If I have to, i’ll do it. New innovations and better movies will get things back on track, but how long will we have to wait before someone comes along with something?