Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Box Office Receipts show a Hollywood in trouble

BizzyBlog has done the hard work and created an interesting table and graph outlining the yearly box office receipts, adjusted for post-2002 inflation, and their varying degrees of decline as well as declining yearly ticket sales. The overall picture is not a pretty one for Hollywood:

The latest round of war-movie failures, explained and discussed in more detail by Mark at Weapons of Mass Discussion this past Saturday, is just another episode in a five-year horror story at the box office for the movie business. Despite the growth of DVD sales and during most of that time and the potential for gold in downloads, the ongoing dismal results at the box office have to be causing headaches in the executive suites in Hollywood.


Head on over to BizzyBlog for the full details and to see the table and graph which clearly illustrate Hollywood's growing problem. The release of yet another anti-military / Iraq War themed movie, Stop Loss, which debuted at number 8 at the weekend box office with a paltry $4.55 million earned can't be helping things. Don't these guys learn from past mistakes?

Speaking of past mistakes, I forgot to mention 2 other anti-military / Iraq War box office flops in my review of Hollywood failures:

Home of the Brave: $51,708 total domestic gross in limited release. Widest release reached was 44 theaters. It's best per theater average was opening night when it brought in a ridiculously weak $680 per theater.

Grace is Gone: $50,899 total domestic gross in limited release. Widest release? 7 theaters.

If Hollywood created a movie where the U.S. military were the good guys and radical Iraqi terrorists the bad guys it'd probably be a hit. Better yet, hire guys like Michael Totten, Michael Yon, Bill Roggio, and JD Johannes as consultants and from their experiences pull together a heroic, dramatic, true-life story from the war in Iraq. I think it would also be very cool to make a "this is a true story" film from the Iraqi perspective as well - I'm sure there are plenty of stories of dramatic heroism on the side of the Iraqi Military / Police and how much neater it would be to film it entirely in their native language and screen it throughout Iraq as well as the U.S.? But it will never happen because the only bad guys Hollywood is really concerned about are 1940's era Nazis, our own government, "evil" corporations, and ourselves.