I love movies. Every year, I embark on a movie-going frenzy in the months before the Oscars, attempting to see every film nominated for even the smallest award. I’ve had mini panic attacks when I realize the amount of money I’ve spent on going to movies was larger than my entire food budget for a month. Normally when I say I haven’t been to a movie in a while, that means I haven’t been to one since last weekend.
Then last week, when I finally went to see IT, I realized I hadn’t been to the theater in approximately five months.
What happened?
What happened certainly wasn’t affecting just me. According to the Hollywood Reporter, summer box office revenue was down 16% from 2016, and it was the first year in over a decade that revenue did not clear the $4 billion mark.
There are many reasons box office sales have been on the decline in recent years. For one, it has become easier and easier to pirate movies that are still in theaters. A Google search for “watch It online free” produced about 505,000,000 hits. That’s enough hits to pretty much guarantee that one of those links will work. It’s becoming everso common to find movies that haven’t even been released yet readily available on the internet. Although pirating is illegal and undermines the movie industry, without any realistic consequences, it will undoubtedly continue to hurt movie sales.
Another factor hurting the box office is review sites like Rotten Tomatoes, which make it easy to judge in a second whether or not you want to see a movie. I’m certainly guilty of using the “tomatometer” to determine whether or not I’ll be dumping $10 on a ticket. No more sitting through hours of bad movies to judge for yourself if it’s a quality film, when one search can show you movies that have already been “guaranteed fresh.”
Which brings us to the final reason I’ll discuss here about why the box office flopped this summer. There weren’t really any movies “guaranteed fresh.” The movies this summer were just… bad. Bad enough apparently to keep an avid movie goer away from the theater for almost half a year. Sorry Hollywood, but The Emoji Movie (with a tomatometer reading of just 10% fresh) just didn’t make me want to dish out $10.
What’s making the movies bad then? Is Hollywood just out of ideas? The sad truth is no, screenwriters in Hollywood have tons of great new ideas, but those new ideas will rarely ever get made. Hollywood learned how to guarantee itself a load of money a while back, and that formula hasn’t changed even if the results have. Tons of remakes and series, which come along with an already dedicated fan base. Excessive amount of horror movies, one of the most reliable genres in the box office. A basic story format, which is easy to write and generates a satisfying story for the audience, until that audience has seen that format one too many times.
Even IT, which broke box office records and was the first drop of rain in months after Hollywood’s summer drought, meets many components of the Hollywood formula. It’s a remake. It’s horror. It’s not an especially new story. IT succeeded because it was well-acted, had good special effects, was well-marketed, and managed to be both funny and scary. Perhaps most important to its success however, was the fact that movie goers were so starved for anything resembling a high-quality film that any remotely good movie warrants the kind of attention that IT received.IT was the first movie in months bringing people into the theaters.
So what’s next for Hollywood? Was this simply one bad summer or was it foreshadowing of the industry’s demise? The next few months are prime time for Oscar hopeful films to be released, which will hopefully offer a much-needed break from poor attempts at summer blockbusters and a ridiculous number of horror movies set to be released in the coming weeks. We’ll have to wait and see how the box office responds to these upcoming films, and the truth is only time will tell if the numbers are on a permanent downward spiral. But in my opinion, if Hollywood doesn’t want to repeat a summer of record lows in 2018, executives will have to take more risks than creating movies they see as having built-in audiences, and allow something truly original to have its turn on the big screen.
All photos public domain and found on pixabay.com