Did you watch the Oscars? Did you care about the Oscars? Statistically, if you’re American, you cared 25% less than 10-15 years ago. US movie theaters sold..
Did you watch the Oscars? Did you care about the Oscars? Statistically, if you’re American, you cared 25% less than 10-15 years ago. US movie theaters sold 5.5 tickets per capita to the American public in 2002 , a number which has since declined to 4.1 in 2016. The overall box office looks healthy, thanks to ticket price inflation, but behind the headline numbers, Hollywood is not what was.
Of course this doesn’t mean it’s doomed; but it’s now a truism, or even an understatement, to say that the movie and television industry has been — and will be further — irrevocably transformed by technology, right down to the fundamental business models. An excellent way to track this transformation is to follow the estimable Matthew Ball , Head of Strategy at Amazon Studios, who has a real knack for tweeting out eye-opening charts such as:
and
The Economist , echoing Ball, published a recent special report about the entertainment industry, headed “Winner takes all.” Put briefly: so much for Chris Anderson’s infamous Long Tail theory, which is deader than a dodo. Instead,
The numbers are remarkable. Disney made last year’s five biggest box-office hits, and pulled in 20% of all worldwide film revenue last year with a mere 14 films. There is so much scripted television out there that if you sat at home and watched a new series, in its entirety, every day of the year, you would still miss out on roughly 100 shows.
And of course this applies to books and music, too. The book industry has lamented the “ death of the midlist ” for many years (which, as something of a midlist novelist myself, I watched with vaguely bitter fascination…) during which it too became a winner-takes-all hit-driven industry.
