Monday Morning Quarterback
By BOP Staff
August 28, 2007
Four beeeeeeeeellion dollars!
Kim Hollis: With this weekend's results, Hollywood notched its first ever $4 billion summer and has surpassed 2006's tallies for seven consecutive weekends. Meanwhile, actual ticket sales are going to fall almost 50 million short of the modern era record of 653.4 million in 2002. Are you more surprised by the revenue record or the fact that even with such a loaded summer of quality titles, ticket sales are still flagging?
Pete Kilmer: I'm not surprised that this was the biggest summer so far, because ticket prices have been raised even more. And I'm not surprised with the low attendance for this summer. Home theater systems with HDTV, people who don't know how to behave at movie theaters, people using the theaters as babysitters and the quick turnaround to DVD and on demand are giving moviegoers options on how to watch movies.
Shane Jenkins: Before having seen any of the movies, I would have expected the summer totals to be quite a bit higher than they are. But since I'm still trying to recover from May's trifecta of terrible three-quels, I'm actually surprised some of these movies didn't drop off bigger and die quicker as word-of-mouth got out. If there's a success story this summer, it's the unusual bounty of quality mid-level titles performing admirably at the box office.
Max Braden: The money record surprises me a little, though the huge sequel openers should have been a clue. I'm at the theater a lot, though, and I just didn't get the sense of long lines like in some previous summers. I happen to think the high quality of cable television series and TV on DVD had something to do with reduced attendance. I haven't heard anything about "gas prices prohibit me from going to the theaters anymore" in long while.
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