I assumed those box office records were also dependent upon global ticket sales vs domestic.

Still, surprising statistics.

Movies are still great, just not the main circuit. If you live in a large city most often you have access to indie movies or secondary rotation of festival movies instead of 3 marvels, one remake and one romantic like in the big box places.

I think they simply did what AAA video games did. They found what sold best at one moment in time and then obsessively tried to work to copy that.

But the problem is that people don't want to play 40 different Call of Duties, or watch 30 different Batmen. It's just that Batman or Call of Duty were the 'meet in the middle' of a variety of different tastes. But when those other tastes aren't accounted for, it becomes nauseating. It's like how most of everybody really likes cake icing, but eating nothing but cake icing is quite a repulsive concept.

I think things like Dune, Interstellar, and other such films emphasize that there's a gaping hole in the market for things besides men in spandex, but it's just not being filled. And there's even extensive social commentary in Dune (as in the book) but it's done through metaphor rather than shoving it down your throat. And the movie is also rather slow paced with some 3 key events playing out in a 155 minute film, yet it continues to do extremely well. On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...

Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.

The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories. Murders are incredibly popular, of course, but so are fraught romances, coming-of-age, and grounded hero-quest movies (which even Bachelorette Party borrows from).

But your point is otherwise completely valid. They found out everyone likes cake, and converted their buffet restaurant to all-cake all-day!

> Not sure that pointing out the success of sci fi franchises is proof audiences want diversity.

The thing is, when AAA games or movie studios start to focus on that one thing that "sells best at one moment" everyone else checks out.

I did checked out of games when I realized they are just not made for me anymore, that stuff I liked is looked down at in the industry and they focus on stuff I do not care about. It was similar process with major movies, at some point too little appealed to me, so I stopped caring entirely.

> The VAST majority of movies that have been made in the past (when the real indicator, % of population going to movies, peaked) deal with ordinary, realistic human stories.

Sure. I like to watch those and I do, on Netflix or whatever. I just do not expect realistic human story or something new from a major Hollywood movie. They are not about any of that.

They didn't that was my point. But if people just go to the food court at the mall and complain there's 90% fast food...

Go to a smaller movie theater, go to movie festivals that happen every year in most big cities, you'll see the majority of movies have nothing to do with the few major Hollywood block busters. And comparing Dune, a major block busters to other ones makes no sense when the point was that you need to go outside the main circuit.

My take is that the movies you see at the arthouse cinema aren't any better than the big movies, they just have a smaller budget. They come out of the same system and would be just as self-indulgent if they had the resources to be.

It shows you don't watch them, you can obviously find Hollywood-without-the-budget cause the people that work in Hollywood come from somewhere, but you also have things that are completely outside. Some documentary about a Georgian truck driver who goes across the country side selling supplies from the city to the villages with long, no dialog shots that go for several minutes, has nothing to do with Hollywood productions and there's a million fractal things like this that would be way too "boring" for mass consumption.

They don't come out of the same system. A nice chunk of them are self-funded and driven by a passion to tell the story.

What on earth??

The mentality of “content creation” plus A/B testing is how we got to Spandex Man #500

> On the other hand those Fremen suits are kind of spandexy...

Well stillsuits are supposed to collect and preserve moisture and shield from heat in extremely harsh environment. I would sort of expect that 8k years in the future some tech for that would be close to the skin, rather than waving thin layers like bedouins or touaregs use.

This is a good point.

Modern movies try to appeal to everyone. Can't be too edgy or too opinionated, don't want to sick rabid hordes of haters on themselves.

And there's a huge segment of the Western population teetering on the edge of death or living in misery in various ways who are a literal matchbox waiting for a spark, no megaconglomerate film company wants to be responsible for setting them off, to the point where it's safer to sell mediocre and milquetoast movies rather than push an opinionated one and risk blowback.

Look at the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or the Craft 2. Both movies built on a previous proven winner, both original movies had something to say.

Beetlejuice was not only a quirky romp through the afterlife but also a story about aboriginalism vs colonialism and whether it is right for the aboriginals to do horrible things to protect what is theirs, and also a story about how embracing change can help cross generational divides and how accepting people who are different from you can enrich your life.

It was very opinionated and had a lot of great subcontext. Same with the Craft.

The Craft was, on its cover, a story about what teenage girls would do if they got magical powers, which then turned into a series of biopics of the deep emotional damages caused by indifferent and hateful people. The movie dealt with racism, sexual assault, murder, mental illness, self esteem, and self acceptance all in the context of a teenybop horror movie.

Then you look at their sequels.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice introduced 3 antagonists, Beetlejuice's wife, the boy, and Lydia's boyfriend.

It started three potential plotlines, the soul sucker, the life swapper, and the gold digger, and brought Beetlejuice in to deal with all three of them.

And then, 80% of the way through the movie, it threw all three of the antagonists and plot lines away and then rehashed the climax of the original movie with a slightly different set of clothes on.

What deeper meaning did Beetlejuice Beetlejuice have? None. No one had any value or made any sense. No one in the entire plot was irreplaceable. No one learned any lessons or grew in any measurable way. Nothing actually happened. They all woke up like they had a bad dream after Lydia's father's funeral, the mother died, the gold digger died, and then the story was over. If the movie had not happened nothing would be different for the characters except that maybe the gold digger would have dug more gold or something.

Then, the Craft 2. It's not a horror movie. It's a teenybop movie where girls get magic and do things with it. They have a trans person in it but she doesn't use her magic to address her transness in any way. There's only a tiny drop of racism, and no one has any real deep issues to resolve.

So, instead, they get David Duchovny in to play as some guy who embodies toxic masculinity, but who is also ineffective and purposeless all the way to the very end of the movie, when all of a sudden he goes murder rapey and then gets easily beaten by the power of feminism and witchcraft.

No one learned anything except GIRL POWER. Nothing really changed for anyone. There were no edges in the movie to explore. It was pointless.

Either sequel could have been much more poignant by touching on real issues that people experience. The Craft 2 could have touched on social media and the need to look like you have a perfect life. They could have touched on what a trans woman would do if she could remold her body with magic permanently or semi permanently like the girl did in the first movie. They could have made Nancy a bigger part of the movie and have her deal with David Duchovny instead of it being a girl power movie, and then Nancy could have taught the girls the things she knows being a former vessel of Manon with 25 years to learn and grow from the experience. It could have gone into a demonstration and discussion on how young women have so much to learn from women even 20 years their senior, and how working together and tearing down walls both of age differences but also gender differences can make the world a better place.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could have made a really fun story out of any of the three protagonists and plot lines if it had picked and chose one of them to run with and made the others the sub plots. The gold digger plotline could have been about accepting what is different about you and not allowing others to convince you to mask your weirdness. The life swapper plot could have been about learning how to accept that you're a normal person who grew up in a weird household, and how that doesn't make you weird and that it is possible to make both sides work together as long as each side values the other. The soul sucker plotline could have been played for laughs as at the end we could have seen Beetlejuice about to win Lydia only to be thwarted by his actual wife and dragged off into the underworld by the leg by her (and end up happy in the end, maybe seeing him slowly reinflate after she sucked the soul out of him, he he sex joke). All of those options were thrown out of the window and instead we get a meandering pointless movie that would have been fine if it had never existed.

Good movies have an opinion and something to say. Napoleon Dynamite is a perfect example of this. It's a bad movie in every measurable way. It's boring. It's slowly paced. It has no plot. It's like a 2 hour slice of life Jello movie. But then, the point of the movie gets driven in, that everyone has value.

It's a simple message told in a long and occasionally humorous manner, but because they didn't try to piledrive the message into you when it hits it hits hard.

Bad movies ramble even more than I do and never make a point for fear of popping a bubble. And media franchises know this and choose to make them anyway rather than be at risk of any blowback. After all, most movies released by a large franchise are profitable by default. The number of AAA movies that did not make their cost of production back in the last 10 years is vanishingly small, to the point where movies that only make 150% of their production costs are considered box office bombs and franchise killers. (Like the Golden Compass, that made $370+ million and won academy awards on a $180m production cost and was considered enough of a failure to end the entire series)

They know how to make good movies. They know how to tell satisfying stories that keep people wanting more. They know how to make a lot of money doing it.

So why do they keep not doing it?

I believe it's 2 things.

1: Fear of offending people and having massive blowback because of it.

The outrages over stupid things like the Little Mermaid being black is a good example of this. Who cares what color her skin is? She's a fish. If the story is good and told well then what does it matter?

But I get it, you can't convince someone who wants to be upset and outraged as a distraction for their own personal problems to focus on their personal problems instead of screaming about DEI or whatever 4 letter flavor of the day they have to rage about. This much is understandable. But still, that's no excuse for making a bad movie, they could have far more easily found the rage points and dealt with them and left the rest of a good movie alone.

But that brings me to my second point.

2: It's on purpose.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but I'm starting to believe that megaconglomerate media companies are intentionally making unsatisfying movies that are highly titillating for the same reason that Doritos flavors their chips in just such a way that you never get satisfied of eating them, that final burst of zest and flavor that would put you over the edge always just out of reach.

It's like the torture of Tantalus, satisfaction always being just outside of arms reach, but knowing that it's close, and occasionally actually satisfying the itch (like any good skinner box) keeps us diving in, spending money, buying merch, showing our love and support for the franchises that once scratched the itch for us in hopes that it will scratch it again next time.

They're doing it on purpose because they know that if you didn't get what you wanted out of this movie, you'll go watch another, or a TV show, or read a book, or play a game, something, because you came to get satisfaction. And if they blue ball you just right, you'll keep spending money until you can't afford to spend any more in hopes that you'll finally get what you're looking for.

I think it's on purpose and I think it will keep getting worse until it cannot get any worse, and then it will be replaced with something else that will be massively satisfying for a while at least.

I feel the same way about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Napoleon Dynamite, but just wanted to add that Michael Keaton’s portrayal was still brilliant and I’m happy he could still pull it off.

The plot and all the non-Beetlejuice scenes were a waste of time.

True! I also could feel the absence of Geena Davis and Alex Baldwin. They had real chemistry in the original movie and real connection to Wynona Ryder. They played perfect foils against Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice as well.

The original was an ensemble cast movie where each person put something into the movie all to support each other, which pushed Michael Keaton's performance far above what it could have been all on its own.

I mean, Michael Keaton was a great Batman in the 1989 movie. Putting him up against Jack Nicholson was a great move, and I think that as Batman he worked really well to both make Batman cool but also to make the villains look properly villainous. His only downfall was that he didn't make a great Bruce Wayne, his energy was too chaotic and over the top for a composed stoic billionaire.

That aside, I think Michael Keaton needs an ensemble to shine his brightest, and they did not give him a strong ensemble in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Don't get me wrong, there are great actors and actresses in the movie, but there was not a lot of time spent with them, reacting off of each other. Each person was on their own solo quest and Beetlejuice mostly either worked alone or so quickly and efficiently dispatched his enemies that they barely had a paragraph of interaction with each other.

It missed out on the synthesis and charm of the original in my opinion, even though each person was good to great on their own.

Drive-ins are nice in smaller towns

The Drive-in will never die.

Ok, what does this have to do with the comment you are replying to? I am genuinely curious how this has any relation to the remarks regarding box office numbers

> All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.

In fact... it looks like they've slightly dropped.

https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/14kznfv/movie_ti...

Dropped? You've produced a graph showing they've been on the increase for the past 30 years.

And where the heck can you get a movie ticket for $11? A discount matinee viewing at my local theaters is from $17 to $20. $20-$23 if you go in the evening. The lowest price ticket, a Tuesday noon showing, is $12.

I don't recall the last time I went to the movies with my wife and spent less than $60 (tickets, a shared soda, two snacks).

My local Cinemark has tickets for $5.50, $8.50... you're probably in a premium market.

$11 sounds about right to me. It's an average so some areas will be higher and others lower but $23 sounds awful.

> And where the heck can you get a movie ticket for $11?

Places where real estate is cheaper than wherever you live.

oh wow, Covid really spell the death of movie theaters, and it's never going to recover.

ONLY because of streaming services. The industry exploded after the 1918 flu.

Was it because of the flu of because of the war?

In my pod we've got the theory that more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture. All the time my son and I have random encounters with people who like Goblin Slayer or Solo Leveling or Bocchi The Rock but never find anybody who is interested in new movies and TV shows. They say Spongebob Squarepants has good ratings -- of course it has good ratings because it is on all the time. People mistake seeing ads for a movie for anyone being interested in the movie.

> more people in the US like anime than domestic pop culture

Difficult to get viewing figures for that, but I find it hard to believe. That does feel like a bubble effect. And possibly a piracy bubble effect too.

In fact the difficulty of getting meaningful viewing figures out of streamers is probably a big part of the problem. Nobody knows what's actually popular. Even those supposed to be getting royalties had no idea (wasn't there a strike over that?). And the streaming services themselves pay far too much attention to the first weeks, preventing sleeper hits or word of mouth being effective.

Part of the bubble is generational, what my parents watch, what I watch and what my kids watch are all very different. Aka the death of "four quadrant" entertainment.

Even just saying "watch" feels off as so much of my kids time is spent with franchises in Roblox or other online games.

I don't tend to like generational analysis because it obscures the Diffusion of innovations analysis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

People think of anime as "for young people" and maybe it is -- but I first saw Star Blazers circa 1981 and thought it was the best thing I ever saw on TV, then about ten years later Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2 and Tenchi Muyo and Guyver and I still watch it. Anime is actually the center of a "media mix" that includes manga, light novels, visual novels, video games, web novels. streaming and other channels. In Japan there must be plenty of people my age who had the same experience starting with Gundam or something like that.

Granted I don't talk to a lot of Xers who like anime, but I sure see it in 20-somethings. (To be fair I see a lot of people who have an obvious squick reaction when they say "I don't care for anime")

Another case where generational analysis goes wrong is in the analysis of TikTok vs YouTube. I'd argue that most of the cultural changes (personalization economy, filter bubbles, an environment where Zohran Mandami does well, ...) actually happened with YouTube but we didn't notice it because it had a broad base, happened slowly, and personalization is deceptive since you don't see what I see -- but TikTok seemed to come on so fast and was visible to people because it affected an "other".

I’m a Gen Xer. Voltron and Robotech were the big ones for me and my friends but these Americanized shows didn’t lead us to anime in general. We weren’t really exposed to real anime and to the degree we were (Akira comes to mind) we couldn’t get our hands on it. Even as a teen when I could finally buy it on VHS selection and availability were very limited. (Manga was somewhat more available.) It’s not surprising to me most of our peers don’t watch it. I still watch it now and almost have the same problem from the opposite angle: There’s so much available finding the good stuff that isn’t just yet-another mediocre shonen or isekai, or is cringey soft porn is difficult.

Anime is the US is about a $2.5B industry, whereas just movies and just box office revenue in the US is about a three times that at around $7.5B. Anime is doing great here and growing fast, but I think you are in a bit of a bubble as far as anime. It tends to be a "bubbly" subculture, so not surprising.

Anime is going to explode. Just did some google fu and apparently 50% of millenials and gen z watch anime weekly. Boomers probably watch almost zero anime so once the demographics shift in 30-40 years, you might expect half of all americans to watch anime weekly by these trends. And this is just considering present rates not the fact that these rates have been increasing over time.

Yeah, the forecast I saw researching my comment is it is going to get to about $8b by 2033 - which will make it about as big as the movie box office sales industry.

Riffing on your SpongeBob comments.

It drives me crazy that all the streaming services seem to only push about 20 different choices from there catalog.

Each row of choices contains the same titles as the previous row. It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service.

They are hampering discoverability.

> It makes no sense to me why should the service care at how popular any single title is as long as we are subscribed to their service

I suspect that, like google's notorious killing of products with "only" tens of millions of users, this is a problem of internal structure. I bet that ranking of who gets into that row is a reflection of the social hierarchy between producers at Netflix whose compensation depends on it.

> They are hampering discoverability.

At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

> At some point Netflix really focused on this, then like google throwing away search, they lost it.

I believe Netflix had a big catalog when people signing their rights thought it was not going to work. Once the model was proven everyone created their platform and stopped licensing to Netflix. Then Netflix had to get closer to making their own shows, and their "discoverability" features centered around hiding how few movies they have.

I’m sure this is the majority of it but it’s an incomplete analysis. Netflix is hampering discovery of even what they do have. I can go to a friends and they can pull up their Netflix with things I had no idea were currently on offer.

How many movie cards can they put on a screen at once...10, at most. How are they supposed to show you what is "on offer"? If their catalog were 10x smaller or 100x larger, they can only show so much.

I supposed they could email customers an excel document. But short of that, they have to make choices about what to do with the pixels on their page, and those choices represent filtering what they show you. How is "hampering discovery" different than what they are physically forced to do?

My complaint is that the repeat the same titles in multiple rows on the same screen.

Oh right, that’s bad.

Sure. That’s not what I mean though. I mean that every time I go to my page it’s roughly the same and only changes based on what’s new that they’ve decided I’ll like. Years ago when they were doing the long tail business model they had an idea what I like. The t feels like they now have an idea of what they’d like me to like.

If I scroll down far enough I’ll loop around and if I scroll through the categories given they’ll overlap. But if I go to someone with different enough taste I’ll see there are things I’d like to be aware of which I don’t k ow how to engage without already knowing about them. We expect this for languages foreign to us but why is it also true for anything the least bit challenging to one’s usual taste?

I don't know if it's really anime eating movies' cake. But anime is generally FAR more on board with literalism than movies. If anime is really eating movies' market share, the lesson movie makers need to learn is to be more on the nose, not less.

is it true that anime is more literalist than cinema? assuming we're looking at anime with an older target market than kids

I don't like (most) Anime (I feel like it's one way I diverge from typical geek culture) but I do often like foreign movies and TV shows more than domestic ones. That's probably an effect too.

On the flip side, I've heard the blandness of larger ticket domestic US films in terms of things like sexual, religious, or political themes attributable to global distribution. Many culture are much more sexually conservative, and most overseas cultures outside maybe Canada and some of Europe would not get (or care about) US politics.

Anime is such a broad genre that it is completely normal to dislike most of it.

Anime is more a medium than a genre; it's like saying one does not like claymation or live-action movies.

Please, anime today is purely for children and teenagers. The golden age of serious anime is long over.

Even then, the adult stuff was still appealing to me as a kid. Take me back to Cowboy Bebop on Toonami..

Your Name is a title that for me reminded me why I became an anime fan many years ago. In 2016 when it came out, anime as a whole was well into its slop era, but Your Name has near Ghibli tier animation and powerful emotional themes rooted in both traditional and modern Japanese culture. It was the exception that proved the rule about anime slop.

What in your mind was the golden age of serious anime? There's tons of trash today (cough 99% of isekai cough), but there was plenty of trash in almost any era of anime. How much god awful "harem anime" came out in the 90s/00s?

The ratio of diamond to coal is the point. Of course you may always find an exception, but like you say there's tons of trash today.

People consider the 80s to early 90s the golden age, not 90s/00s. It isn't something I just made up.

Well also SpongeBob is excellent and one of the greatest shows ever made.

Well domestic pop culture is shadow of what it was back in 2012. And the 2012 otaku culture itself was alot more unrestrained than it is today. If anything, anime has generally gotten alot more sanitized and homogenous which has contributed to it's acceptance to the larger mainstream community. Tolerate it or not after all, lolicon was a major part of that preceding era, but it's far more controversial today than it was back then with modern audiences. Alot of what was achieved back then is literally not possible today. It's just that mainstream pop culture has declined even worse that people are moving to the former.

Anime has the same discoverability problem as film and other media.

The anime that you mentioned are things that are popular _right now_. There are a few shows from a decade or so ago that people are told to go watch and do but only a few.

How many newly minted anime fans do you know that are going and digging through the 80s and 90s OVA trash that really defined the medium? (and for every one of those there are 50 more who will complain to you about the animation quality because they were raised on nothing but full CG animation...)

That's just as niche as being a cinephile is today.

My social circle is into afrobeats and amapiano and, to a much lesser extent, american film. I think people just gravitate towards their niche.

When movies are made for entertainments sake, they can still do well. ( Top Gun 2, for example ).

I’m really looking forward to the Space Balls sequel. I have hopes that one will be good.

If movie needs number to be distinguishable then it is probably not good.

Good thing it was called Top Gun: Maverick, then! No number necessary. :-)

I don't know that I agree "Does the sequel dramatically change the naming convention" is a particularly powerful marker of quality.

Unfortunately, Top Gun 2 was not "for entertainment's sake" it was another round of US military advertising/propaganda, just like the first one.

If it wasn't sufficiently entertaining, it would be ineffective as propaganda.

The main driver IMO is the death of the tight 90 minute, 80 Million decently acted thriller / action / comedy film. Everything is too big, too epic, too simplistic, and too long.

What about all the lower budget 1-5M contemporary films from the 90s? There's no new directors like Kevin Smith / Quinten Tarantino anymore.

I'd be fine with the length if they actually used the time for something good.

If I understand movie theater economics correctly, the studio gets 80 to 95% of the ticket sales, depending on how "first run" the movie is. The theaters actually make their money on selling concessions.

Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.

Just an off-the-cuff hypothesis...

Bit of a tight line to walk. Longer movies mean fewer showings per day. When I saw that Oppenheimer was three hours long -I want to watch that at home so I can take a bathroom break/snacks so a personal pause button is an improvement on the theater.

If movies are regularly going to be 3 hours long, movie theatres need to bring back intermission breaks.

I've always thought this would make sense.

Often during a three hour film I've ran out of refreshments and would like to buy a drink or something for the last hour.

It used to be fairly common with the big "epic" films. And probably no live theater production is going to go much over 90 minutes without an intermission.

I sometimes wonder if we’re using the correct metrics to measure all that. Today, it’s a lot easier to access film and series - streaming, local indie cinemas, YouTube. There is A LOT of movies and yet commentary and awards are always limited to AAA titles and artists. Just the other day, I saw this short on YT and it gave me all kinds of feels and thoughts but even IMDb wouldn’t list it.

So maybe, cinema is no longer an exclusive medium for this kind of content and box office numbers (just like revenue for big tech) aren’t supposed to always go “up”.

Yes, and "prestige tv" took off, shifting a lot of viewing to 100 hour TV series.

What was the short?

2002 was also when broadband internet and movie piracy became more prolific - DivX was just out, DVD burners became a thing, etc. Streaming video was in its infancy, with TiVo and VOD slowly becoming a thing (although that only reached mainstream in 2007 when Netflix launched). DVDs and DVD players became mainstream, as well as flat TVs, HD video, etc.

Anyway. The tech in the movie theaters did improve by a lot since then, 3D was a fad but we get 4K, imax, Dolby Atmos, etc nowadays. But it's not as popular as back then, cost and convenience probably being important factors, but the lack of long exclusivity (it's now only weeks sometimes until a film is out on streaming) and the overflow of media nowadays isn't helping either. The last really popular film was the Marvel films and the last Avatar film, other than that it feels all a bit mediocre or unremarkable.

I wonder if that's the other factor. The 90's and early 2000s were for many people the highlight of filmmaking - this may be a generational thing. But there were years where multiple films would come out that were still remembered fondly for years or decades after.

Meanwhile, I couldn't name you a single good or standout film from the past year or years. Nothing I remember anyway. I think the combination of the LotR trilogy and the Star Wars prequels ruined films forever for a lot of people, in a good way for the former and a bad, cynical one in the latter, lol.

There is no evidence as to piracy even being a cause for the decline, I say this not as a supporter (I do not pirate) but to correct a misconception.

2002 is when tvs got larger, fidelity with cable tv improved, dvds were readily available, etc. it was also an era where more people started gaming (the industry took off around this time), so people were shifting away from movie theaters as a social activity.

The rise of literalism (as in the article) is probably a partial response to increasingly shorter attention spans.

Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.

> Songs are shorter (<3 minutes) and lyrics simpler as a result. People don’t want to think anymore.

Beatles songs are around 164 seconds long on average.

https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/uploads/6/5/4/3/6543054/durat...

An 2005 compilation of Johnny Cash’s greatest songs averages just a little over three minutes per song.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Johnny_Cash

Gerry and The Pacemakers did not have long songs either.

https://www.discogs.com/master/369149-Gerry-And-The-Pacemake...

Neither did the Kingston Trio.

https://www.discogs.com/release/666498-Kingston-Trio-The-Kin...

Before recording, popular forms of folk music typically has just one fairly short melody. You can repeat it over and over with different melodies but the “core” is simple and short . Sing “Oh Susana” or “Kalinka” or “Scarborough fair” to yourself and count the seconds before you the melody repeats.

Frankly, “popular songs being over three minutes long” is likely an anomaly in the history of humanity. What we are seeing with shorter songs is probably just a regression to the mean.

I've noticed on outings that some songs I hear on the PA system now will slow themselves down momentarily for what I'm sure is a "tiktok soundbyte". I'd be curious to see how music discovery works via that avenue

> People don’t want to think anymore.

Or the bean counters in charge target the largest common denominator, shaving off the long tail of above-average sophistication with every mediocre release.

It's far more this, plus a combo of not only targeting the largest common denominator, but having to do that internationally which obliterates any script's ability to tie into cultural knowledge or norms, or the "vibes" of any given population. Not to mention nothing ever goes to screen that can't be quickly scooped out to appease the Chinese censors, lest they lose the largest audience on earth right out of the gate.

And I don't think you can totally disregard that movies cost more than they ever have to make while also looking worse than they ever have. The special effects in Pirates of the Caribbean utterly trounce newer productions that cost far more to make just for everyone to bounce around green screen stages in motion capture pajamas, and to be clear, this is not industry professionals costing too much or being bad at their jobs, it's almost solely down to the studios wanting the ability to hysterically tinker with films until the 11th hour to ensure maximum market reach.

The industry should be ashamed of itself.

I'm not a fan of horror, but it seems like it's still extremely profitable (low budget -> solid viewership in theaters/streaming) and the one genre where creatives have enough freedom to experiment and do stuff out of the ordinary

or the least common denominator is decreasing, as people increasingly will scroll on their phone as they watch a film at home - just like most daily activities.

All of media, art, and majesty have been an attempt to stave off boredom, be it through glory, or splendor, or sex.

We have more boredom today than ever before in the past, and the richnesses of our lives are gutted with the continuous striving against the specter of boredom.

It's all been bread and circuses since before the fall of Rome. We only strive to make something happen until we reach the point where we have everything we ever wanted, and then we don't have the first clue what to do with it.

Netflix wasn't launched in 2007. The streaming service was launched in 2007. Netflix as a company was founded in 97 and was ubiquitous by 2002. Why go to the movies and pay $100+ for a family when you could wait 4-6 months for the home release and get the movie mailed to your home? You could go out and buy a box of microwavable popcorn and a few bags of candy and still save 80 bucks.

I wonder how much of that is because the movies themselves changed vs everything else that has changed. Back in 2002 most people still watched tv on CRT that were very small by today's standard and had very low resolution. You either had to go out and rent a movie, rewatch something you had recorded or bought or watch whatever was on and enjoy the ads. Now we have a huge choice of movies and tv shows at our finger tips any time. Yes, the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema but I also sit much closer. I can pause the movie when I need a bathroom break. I can eat and drink what I want. A movie has to be really good for me to want to spend $40-$50 on going to see a movie with my wife. No travel required, no sitting through ads, no risk of someone in the audience being obnoxious.

I used to go to the cinema quite a bit. Now I only go once every 1-2 years to see something on IMAX that I hope will really benefit from it. In recent years that was just the two Dune movies and most recently the F1 movie. Unfortunately, even the biggest IMAX theater in my area is still not what I'd consider a proper IMAX like the Metreon in SF so I'm always underwhelmed. Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.

I used to watch a lot of smaller movies in the cinema. That's stopped entirely. With any movie the question now is how long till we just can watch it at home. Smaller movies which I'd be more willing to support frequently even seem to skip the few months where you have to rent them and go straight to streaming. So unfortunately even less incentive to go to the cinema.

Culture around it doesn't help either. Friends used to recommend movies that they watched in the cinema. I can't even recall when that happened last.

> Not sure if that's because this IMAX is too small or because even IMAX stopped being amazing due to growth and improvement of other screens.

IMAX broadened the licensing about 10-15 years ago. I'm not an IMAX person, but people who are complained a lot about it at the time.

> Yes the screen is still much smaller than in the cinema

I recently got a a pair of XR glasses (ray neo 3). Pretty much replicates the full cinema experience. Only downside is it isn't a shared experience.

Can you read text for long periods on those?

I won't recommend it for doing any kind of coding. its workable but far from ergonomic. That said, my pair is perfect for streaming shows and playing video games. Im going to wait till a system with true spatial anchoring and 4k come to market. I think at that point, Id be willing to use it as a virtual monitor.

Noted.

> Im going to wait till a system with true spatial anchoring and 4k come to market.

On that day, I'm taking my iPhone, a keyboard, and those future glasses and will work from under a tree.

I genuinely without rose colored glasses think the obvious explanations is true which is that movies simply became worse since 2002 vs now. Look at the movies released 1999 vs 2024 and the reason fewer people go out to watch them is obvious

I was going to say, were movies really that good in 2002?

Catch Me If You Can

Gangs of New York

The Pianist

City of God

Yes, yes they were lol. It is almost hard to believe those all came out in the same year.

Imagine in 2025 having to pick if you want to see The Pianist or City of God? It is just so unthinkable

Even if you thought another movie was gonna be as good as City of God right now, do you think you'd be as likely to actually go to the cinema to see it as you were in 2002 or might you simply wait, safe $20 and a trip and watch it at home 3 months later? I think both factors play a role and they have synergy as well. Fewer people go to the cinema -> smaller market and less incentive to take risks -> fewer people go to the cinema -> ...

I think there’s a lot to that. It feels both like the market shrunk in the sense that they’re competing with options which didn’t exist back then but also two other interesting changes: very expensive movies need the international market to be really profitable which limits creativity somewhat (more social norms to stay within, many topics to avoid) and also leads to uncreating safe bets. The other big change was that streaming services sucked up a lot of audience & creativity, but aren’t tracked in box office revenue and also have different goals and weird relationships with their audiences (e.g. Netflix is so quick to cancel that some people never watch an incomplete series).

That's roughly when I largely stopped going to see movies. I stopped because movies started sucking too much. Sure, there is still the occasional wheat kernel, but there's so much chaff that it's no longer worth just taking a chance on a new movie.

In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.

Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often. Unless you specifically want "the movie theater experience" or you absolutely have to see a certain movie at launch you're not going to the theatre to watch a movie. The number of movie views per person may well be down (or up), but box office ticket sale counts don't really answer that question.

Why do you bring up 4:3 as a bad property? Honestly I find watching 4:3 easier on the eyes and mind since you know where to look.

The TV might have been 4:3, but most DVD movie releases were widescreen by 2002. So you lost upto 40% of that 27" CRT to letterboxing.

The pan-and-scan DVDs seemed to die out long before everyone had 16:9 TVs. Consumers seemed to decide they preferred letterboxing over cropping.

It's less about whether one considers option A better than option B and more about whether the movie was shot for one option or "edited down" (pan and scan) to TV. If cinemas of the 90s had been 4:3 and TVs of the time 16:9, requiring crops to fill the screen properly, I'd have made the opposite statement.

You might be an outlier. Our FOV is wide, so it's a better match. Furthermore, the 4:3 version of a movie is almost always a crop from the intended ratio, so information and intent is lost.

Ye I think my FOV is fine I did tests for my driving license. I feel it has more to do with me being distracted by things in the peripherals.

And ye cropped is bad. Think STNG.

> Our FOV is wide, so it's a better match.

It's pretty big vertically as well. IMAX is close to 4:3

I've wondered why they haven't done an anamorphic IMAX to use the full screen instead of cutting back and forth from wide to square.

I though IMAX was almost 4:2, but it looks like there are two ratios, 1.43:1 and 1.90:1. So 4:2.8 and 4:2.1.

> almost always

Well, you've just revealed which kind of “content” you watch (by revealing which kind you don't). A lot of well known films were shot on full frame, and never had any other variant.

Frankly, seeing them in theatres “as intended” would require inventing a time machine, or not missing some special film screening event, as they were made quite some time ago.

Also, back then, when they still had to make film prints for distribution, and had to deal with wide screen theatres and regular screen theatres (you couldn't just ignore the other half, and lose a potentially significant share of income), both filming and editing took that into account. Shots in one aspect ratio were usually composed to look god when cut to the other, and professional cameramen (working with both types) constantly kept that in mind anyway. Same for possible TV screening versions later.

Now compare that to the modern nameless editors working for giant corporations which pretend that it's an impossible task that has never been done, and either crop automatically, or let the “smart computer” toss a coin to shift responsibility.

Edit: By “theatres” I've meant types of film projectors installed in their halls. Some had multiple, switchable lenses, etc., some had only one. Keep in mind that to show a multi-reel movie without pauses you need at least two projectors (or a special feeding system for spliced together film if the number of screenings is worth the work), and a third one is often added for redundancy and required maintenance work, so there's a lot of investment to make already.

I was going to make this point myself. I think my wife and I have seen maybe three or four movies in a theater since COVID. Our theater didn't even close during COVID (they started marathoning older movies like Harry Potter), but once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be.

So now we just wait for a movie we want to see to become available on Apple TV, and then we rent it.

> once the big companies started releasing new movies directly on streaming services, we realized how much better seeing a new movie in the comfort of our own home can be

As someone who is blessed to live in a city where multiple cinemas screen old movies and therefore go to the cinema very often, I must say I can’t disagree more. The experience of watching a movie in a cinema is to me incomparable to watching on a tv.

It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

Sadly, I have to say I agree with the article however in that 95% of the movies produced in the USA during the past two decades could as well not exist. Thankfully, the rest of the world still exist.

> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

To share an anecdote to counter this, a group of ~10 people gathered at a friends house to watch a movie none of us had seen. At the end of the movie, we all got up in a similar state and we then spent quite a bit of time talking about that shared experience. It was probably one of the coolest group movie watching experiences to date.

Tastes vary. I was on the executive committee of my college film group yers ago and going to weekend films was a lot of fun.

These days? Maybe an Imax film is a once a year experience.

I keep in touch with a lot of people I was on the film committee with and I'd say the opinion is pretty much split between people who still go to the theater a lot and those who basically never do like myself.

I much prefer going to the museum with an IMAX to see that content vs the next superhero tights wearing flick in IMAX

I will agree with you up to a point. Some cinema-going experiences are without parallel.

I saw a screener of The Matrix two months ahead of release at a theater in Harlem. It was the best movie-going experience of my life and nothing has come close to capturing that.

The problem is that was only possible one time. There are so few movies made anymore that really capture that kind of mass-audience wow factor that make going to the cinema worth it.

The great films that I've seen since aren't diminished by me seeing them at home. Sometimes it's a question of format where there are only a few screens in the country where you can really see a film unmolested but you have to be lucky enough to live there and those films still only come around once a decade.

> The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

I very much agree with this sentiment, unfortunately post-COVID that transformation has often been a negative one in my personal experience. This is entirely anecdotal, but I feel like there is an increase in the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.

I feel like when a movie comes out now that I want to see, I am in a constant tension between dealing with a potentially rowdy or obnoxious public, or a less ideal viewing experience at home.

> the frequency with which I have had a public movie experience ruined by people on cell phones, talking to each other, or even yelling in response to the events on screen.

I will not go to a theater that does not have a well established policy of not tolerating this. For me, that's Alamo Drafthouse.

> It’s not only the bigger screen and better sound system. The act of sitting yourself in the cinema with other people to actively engage with a movie transforms the experience.

I think I understand that, but it's not for me. I've never felt that other people do anything but subtract from my experience in watching a movie. And I'm not saying that to be cynical or because I dislike the social experience – I'm an outgoing person and enjoy being around other people; I just don't want to watch a movie with them.

The thing that attracts me to a theater is the sound system that I'll never have at home. However, on the last couple of ventures to the theater, the sound was too loud. I don't think it was the mix of the audio, but just the theater's volume knob turned to an 11. Would it have been different if the theater was full vs the half empty? I doubt it. It was just too loud. I no longer return to that specific theater

Yeah, I don't want to sound like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I've found myself wanting earplugs, especially with showings in Imax. Much much too loud, so loud it hurts. Who wants that?

Ask to turn it down. I've done this, I was with my daughter, it was hurting both of us. The cinema staff were totally fine with it, and not surprised.

I can make good coffee at home, but I still love going to coffee shops. It's the same for going to the cinema for me. It's an event. Something about being out in public. Also my local cinema serves beer. I haven't been in ages due to having kids. But I really miss it.

It's an event but one to put off for later.. Something good enough for right now where there's not much planning, anticipation or potential buyer's remorse is the kind of thing that is routine to do instead of consider.

And probably add to the fact that streaming TV has become vastly more ubiquitous, popular, and high quality.

When I was an undergrad ages ago, going to the on-campus movies were a non-trivial part of the weekend experience. My understanding is that they're mostly dead at this point.

> And probably add to the fact that streaming TV has become vastly more ubiquitous, popular, and high quality.

The first two I agree with, the third one is a stretch. The quality of programming that HBO was putting out in the mid 90s and 00s is far higher than any streaming series that has ever been released.

I don't have an HBO sub at the moment. But I do find quite a few mostly serialized TV shows on streaming.

Also, I know this sounds like get off my lawn, but people behaved better. Or maybe they didn't didn't, but the penetration of flashlights kept in people's pockets wasn't 100%. Which is pretty annoying now that a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn.

> a movie for two is like a $75 experience with popcorn

A ticket is less than $15 during the expensive times, and $10 off peak. Where in the world are you seeing movies?

I get it, I don't go to the theater anywhere near what I used to, but the nice one near me with a bar and a player piano in the lobby is still nowhere near $75 for two tickets.

Pricing greatly depends on location. Full-price tickets are $28.99 in New York for non-IMAX or special showing. Los Angeles is $22-24. My local theater in a small Arizona town is $10 full-price and $5 off peak.

We just saw Superman in a Las Vegas IMAX and it was $85 including fees for three tickets. $75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.

>$75 for two seems perfectly reasonable in LA, SF or NY once you include concessions.

Perhaps it's reasonable for a very occasional and special event, but it's not actually that expensive for anyone that cares about seeing movies in theaters. I'm paying $27/mo for effectively all-I-can-watch[1] movies via a subscription in SF, and includes IMAX. When I travel to LA I can use it there too, and it's available in NYC. I saw Superman for the cost of popcorn because I saw Elio earlier this month, it's a great deal.

If one doesn't go to theaters that often or cares for IMAX, there's other chains that offer 1 2D-only movie for $12/month and the tickets roll over.

[1] 4x movies/week, which is indeed more than I have time for.

It was a fancier theatre, but I saw Elio a few weeks back and each ticket at a Burbank AMC was $22 (this was on a Wednesday Night). That's just California for you.

the local theatre I normally go to is $12 off-times and $20 on-time. A nice special kick to the head that they need to separately specify a $2 "convinience fee" for saving their time and ordering online.

Went to see the F1 movie a couple weeks ago in suburban Northern California on a local theater's "LieMax" screen (ie not one of the ~30 real IMAX 15-perf film theaters in the world but just a slightly larger mall theater screen that (probably) has a newer bulb and more recently calibrated speakers). It cost just over $75 for two adults + a large popcorn, soda and bottle of water.

I was a bit surprised at the price too. Seems maybe 15-20% more than my last theater outing last Summer. We don't go often because we have a dedicated home theater room that's fully sound proof with total light control and 9 custom theater loungers on two levels facing a 150-inch screen with 4K HDR10+ calibrated digital laser projector and built-in 7.4.2 surround THX-rated speakers. While there was nothing wrong with the "LieMax" theater, the picture, sound, seating and overall experience at home are meaningfully better - even when everything works at the cinema and no one is annoying. And I say that as someone with fairly significant professional video engineering experience. Of course, one of the ~30 real IMAX screens is objectively better (when showing 15-perf 70mm film, which they don't always do) but the nearest one is nearly an hour drive, costs even more and has $15 in parking on top. The last time I went was for Oppenheimer two years ago. But short of going there, it's hard to see much reason to go to a local cinema if you have a high-end home theater rig (other than just having a night out).

There's not even an advantage to the claimed "big screen" at the LieMax. While I prefer a slightly larger theatrical field of view than most people (around 45 degrees), my FOV at home is 46 degrees sitting 12.5 feet from the floor-to-ceiling screen (https://acousticfrontiers.com/blogs/Articles/Home-theater-vi...).

I know there are smarter ways to invest your cinema money, but I checked how much I could spend in a fancy cinema in Munich, Germany for the OPs experience and came up with 19€ per ticket (balcony plus a popular superhero movie), plus 16€ for a (big) popcorn and two drinks, for a total of 54€ or ~USD 63.

I agree that the average experience could easily cost half that, but the point of how expensive cinema can be (imagine adding a second popcorn or, God forbid, nachos!) is a good one.

Each non-imax ticket at my local theater is $20.74. I just punched in the 2 tix, 1 popcorn, and 2x sodas: $61.08 + tax. And that's w/ no candy, and I love sour candy.

$40 for popcorn.

I watch about 3 movies a week with my wife. The cheap ticket is 6.50€ (Mondays), the normal is 8.50€.

Dresden, Germany

We don't watch streams, as my wife constantly talks over it. Which she cannot in the movies

^ All of that, and the COST. The last time the wife and I did a movie night for a big new flick we were excited about, we spent almost $80 when all was said and done for tickets and snacks for the TWO OF US!

Fucking absurd.

Plus the 30 minutes of previews and messages from the theater.

That's now part of "the movie theater experience".

I miss the days of the slideshows that would play while people where getting seated for the film. I loved the occasional trivia slides.

This is so frustrating for me. By the time the movie actually starts I'm exhausted and ready to leave. It's also the same commercials over and over. The previews are rarely something I want to see too.

A local non chain theater has no commercials before movies. Just the trailers.

Makes me want to only go to that theater.

Also it doesn't take skipping many movies now to be able to put a decent sound system with your 50"+ TV.

There are still some fun things to do at particular theaters, like Twisters in 4dx. But there is little compelling reason to otherwise.

This doesn't account for the decline starting in 2002. I'd like to see piracy numbers though- particularly the "official" mppa and riaa numbers

Back in the year 2002...

Internet access was widely available.

Blockbuster video was a thing in almost every town.

Netflix mail service was getting big, making huge back catalogs available.

DVD players often included S/PDIF out for surround sound, which was becoming a more common part of home theaters.

Plasma TVs were becoming far more common, dramatically improving picture quality and size versus CRTs.

HBO and other premium channels had already gone digital with set top boxes (that also often supported surround sound), and the death of analog broadcast TV was (theoretically) scheduled for 2006.

So while I probably couldn't find any single specific reason for a peak in 2002, we had a whole series of tech improvements in place that were slowly chipping away at the edges in quality and content availability.

DVD player sales were also just starting to boom; they overtook VCR sales the next year.

Honestly I wish I had put "(or maybe a new fangled DVD)" instead of "or DVD" because people seem to interpret that as "DVD wasn't good enough to have any impact on movie sales" rather than "either VHS or DVD at the time were still shit compared to the options now so does a decrease in ticket sales really guarantee a decrease in movies watched?"

DVD adoption (and later Blu-Ray) was certainly a huge factor in the gradual changes and 2002 was when people really started amassing them at home https://i.imgur.com/OHZ9H69.png. I'm sure piracy has a role as well too, but most of the deltas listed were also gradual changes which had their start prior to 2002, same as piracy. The only thing special about 2003 is it's the year the momentum changed, not that it's the year something brand new was introduced.

Nah, I don't buy this. In 2002 your "low quality DVD" was peak quality for us. Same way the blocky renders of PS1 was peak video-gaming for us. It only looks low quality when compared with today. For us at the time, it was magnificent.

> For us at the time, it was magnificent.

At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?

The parent post is arguing that the gap in experience between home theaters and theater theaters has shrunk immensely. Right now I have a 85" wide OLED in my living room - That's not a thing that existed in 2002

No, but it was good enough for most movies. The person you replied to is correct: It was glorious at the time. We were all amazed by graphics, even on those old tvs. The "movie theater experience" wasn't worth the hassle for anything but movies with good action and graphics - things like comedies didn't get uniquely better at the theater.

It didn't need to be about the same or better, it just needed to be good enough to appreciate that you weren't dealing with the downsides. The theaters weren't that good back in the late 90's (in fact, most of the ones I visited in my teens have renovated to be more current sometime around 2010 or something). All people needed was more realistic alternatives. More and more folks were getting cable, DVD players were more affordable, and places like walmart sold DVDs for a cheaper price than you'd pay for a full price movie. Netflix started in the late 90s too.

Yes, I know folks could rent videos before this. I remember walking down to rent NES games when I was young - right next to the movies at the grocery store. This was a far cry from the stores of the late 90s, though. They got better (and worse).

> No, but it was good enough for most movies. The person you replied to is correct: It was glorious at the time. We were all amazed by graphics, even on those old tvs.

I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. No it wasn't.

Movies on TV weren't glorious at all. They weren't "amazing." They were what you made do with. And when a classic movie played at your local arthouse theater you grabbed a ticket because it was so much better. The image quality. The sound. Seeing the whole image rather than a bunch of it hacked off.

That's why we went to the theater. Not just for action. For comedies too. Which is why comedies made tons of money at the theater!

It wasn't that they were amazing. Good enough.

And while maybe not amazing, they were wonderful at the time. Do you remember folks being amazed at the graphics on the PS1 or heck, even the N64? Those weren't good, really, but at the time? Yeah, it was good enough. Late 90's started seeing bigger tvs and sound systems. DVDs brought options to see all that stuff on the sides if you wanted. You didn't "make do" if you are out there buying modern tech - maybe you made do with whatever brands they sold at walmart - but then again, they sold game systems so it really wasn't "store brands only" or anything like that.

I'm not sure where you lived, but absolutely no theaters around me showed classics, save for something like Star Wars or Disney movies. One played second run movies - the ones in the space between theater release and home video release. So no, no one went to things like that. I graduated high school in the mid 90s, and both local theaters were pretty run down places that treated employees badly. The ones in smaller surrounding towns, if they had it, usually only played a handful of movies and were old places. And this seemed pretty normal for Indiana, outside of perhaps Indianapolis or a few richer areas.

> At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?

No, I didn't. I don't think it either today, with my pretty big TV. The experience still pales in comparison.

Are you saying you'd order raw quality differently than:

  2002 TV setup < 2022 TV setup < movie theater

Or are you just saying that a home TV setup is still not as good as a movie theater? The point for the latter was the delta between home and theater used to be much larger, not that the delta is now 0, hence a decrease in theater ticket sales would make sense even if people were watching more movies. If the former, what order do you see it and what leads you to order them in the way you do?

No, what I mean is the 2002 experience was awesome for us in our time, like the 2022 is for people of today. But both experiences still pale compared with a movie teather. It's like for us at the time the DVD was a 8, modern TV is maybe a 10, but movie rather in both cases was like a 10000. It was, and it is, in a complete another level.

The big difference maker imo in movie theater experience is size and sound. You still need to drop about the same few thousand dollars you had to drop in 2002 to buy a proper projector and sound system today. 85 inch low pixel density screen and a sound bar ain't it, but if it is it for you, you are probably no discerning audiophile who would have probably have been fine with whatever was sold in a comparable market segment in 2002 (refrigerator width crt displays were in fact all the rage and very desirable at one point).

You can drop about $800 on a great 1080p projector, screen, and a pair of AirPods that will give you better surround sound than most speaker systems will give you.

My projector screen takes up more of my vision than any movie theater screen I've ever seen except IMAX.

People don't just go to the cinema for the image/audio quality. Most people go to meet friends.

That's kind of my point. You don't need to go for image/audio quality at all now. It's purely social, or to see something sooner.

Whereas it used to be very much about image and audio quality.

I'm sorry but airpods and a 1080p screen from your couch are on a different planet compared to theater sound and even liemax or smaller formats. You can't feel sound from an airpod in your chest.

I’ll chime in as a grey beard. Did we think the DVD was the same as being at the theater? It really depends on who your friends were. Some of us kids had techie parents that had things like VGA projectors for presentations. We would take these and play DVD’s off our full-tower Pentium 3’s at movie theater-like experiences. I fondly remember watching the Matrix bonus content with my friends over a giant 100ft wall.

Fight Club as well.

It was no IMAX but at 1024x1024 we didn’t care.

DVD is 720x480

The projectors were 1024x1024 but yes you are correct. We just scaled it up to fit and used a black desktop background.

Note that most people in 2002 didn't have DVD players. DVD player sales didn't even overtake VCR sales until a year or so afterwards, and there was a huge installed base. Watching on a DVD would not have been the _typical_ experience.

We watched a lot of films in divx or xvid or whatever that format was called where you could compress a movie on a CD. Quality was atrocious, but a good story is still a good story...

I put almost $20k into a home theater setup. And with what I bought and how I set it up it punches way above its weight. I only have to wait 3 weeks to 3 months to be able to watch a movie at home now. Why would I go to a theater!?

I used to make exceptions for independent films when I lived near an IFC theater, but streaming/vod services now have me covered there too and I don't live near one anymore.

Now you should sell tickets to people to come watch movies at your house.

Okay, what happened in 2003 then?

There was a ~3% delta in absolute ticket sales.

I take it you really mean "so why wasn't 2003 the peak year instead of 2002" to which I'd say "I'm not trying to explain one needs a 55" widescreen 4k TV before you'll ever consider going to the movie theater less often, rather that this kind of difference over time is why you can't say movie theatre ticket sales in 2002 were higher so people must therefore have watched more movies then."

No, my question is why did it start going down in 2003 for the reasons you cited, which seem to be contemporary

Not sure I follow, why should there be a single year people started e.g. buying bigger TVs?

I didn't say there was, but what do you think changed that year that they went down? It's your assertion, not mine...

Now I'm doubly confused... where did I assert what about 2003? My comment is about why you can't look at movie theater ticket sales between 2022 and 2002 as evidence alone to say people have stopped watching movies as much. I don't think I ever said anything about why ticket sales peaked in 2002 specifically?

If I had to throw a guess at the largest contributors I'd say 2002-2003 is when people really started buying lots of DVDs for the first time as well as the start of the modernization of TV sets. Even though much better versions of these were common 20 years later I feel they very likely helped make the absolute peak of ticket sales be 2002. This is getting more into speculation of what did happen rather than saying ticket sale data is not enough to support the conclusion though, which is what my comment was focused on.

You didn't. You said the peak hit in 2002. Presumably something happened that caused the trend to start in 2003, which could obviously not be the fact that eventually in 2025 it would be more convenient to instead stream movies at home.

>In 2002, watching a movie at home for most people meant flinging a low quality VHS or DVD onto a ~27" tube TV (with a resolution so worthless it might as well be labeled "new years") using a 4:3 aspect ratio pan & scan of the actual movie. Getting anything recent meant going out to the Blockbuster anyways. In 2022, watching a movie meant streaming something on your 50+" 16:9 4k smart TV by pressing a button from your couch.

Is what I was responding to.

That quote doesn't talk about the peak at all though so why am I said to make such claims? The quote should have the same exact meaning even if you substitute in 2001 or 2003 when reading 2002 - if it doesn't then you're inserting claims not from the quote on my behalf and then asking me to explain these claims I never made.

The quoted section was in response to the claim movie watches are down on the basis ticket sales are down compared to the past:

> And this is highly relevant for things like this. People often argue that if movies were so bad then people would stop watching them, unaware that people actually have stopped watching them!

Hence the next line after the quote "Box office ticket sales say people go to the theatre less often, not that people watch movies less often."

That's about when DVD players started becoming common; it's the first year that their sales exceeded those of VCR players.

Movies had a century as one of the main stages for global culture.

That era is ending, and other things are replacing them, mostly based on computers and internet.

If you love movies this is sad, but movies once replaced other beloved things.

The world spins on and nothing is forever. Enjoy the ride!

Eben Moglen observed that at one time people were building giant stone pyramids, then the social and technological conditions changed, and people stopped making new ones. That's OK, it's not a sad thing that there are no new pyramids, we still have the old ones and people still find them awesome.

And he says maybe big-budget movies are like that too, something that culture will do for a while and then move on to something different when the conditions change.

I for one want new giant stone pyramids. :)

Ecch, you know who would be building them? Mark Andressen.

No thanks.

Even within the medium there was a whole generation of beloved silent-film stars that didn't make the transition to talkies. Every era has a beginning and an end.

I think within the next 20 years we will see the rise of AI generated movies custom fit for your pleasure that will contain information to educate you, images to astound you, a story that will pluck at your heart strings and that you will be able to personally influence by your words and choices and reactions.

They'll end up being more like video games than traditional movies, and no two playthroughs will be exactly the same, and eventually you will be able to stay in the movie world and advance the story for days or weeks at a time.

A major contributor to Titanic being the best selling movie by tickets sold is the amount of people that went to watch it multiple times, and going to see a movie multiple times in 1997, while not common, was not unusual because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

> it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

Right, there are only so many walls to paint in a cave…

1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.

There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.

Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.

IMO actual quality components are still just as remote as 20 years ago. A proper setup is more or less the same technology as it has been for decades: good speakers, good amplifier, placed appropriately, and none of this has really seen any democratization. People buy sound bars and such but these are a far cry to what an actual sound system is like that you probably need to spend in the 4 figures to achieve. Buy enough sound bars that fall apart in a couple years for a couple hundred dollars and you could have bought a proper amplifier, speakers, in a setup that is actually modular, expandable, upgradeable, and serviceable.

I have never heard of sound bars falling apart after a couple years, is that common? Every piece of sound equipment I've ever bought has lasted at least 15 years, my sound bar is 5 years old.

In general I think the sound bar audience is different from the hi-fi audio audience. I was fine with using the TV's built-in speakers until LCD TVs took over from CRTs and the built-in speakers became much tinnier and quieter because they couldn't fit quality speakers in a flatscreen TV case. I suspect most people who buy sound bars are in a similar situation.

Kind of reminds me of the beats headphones phenomenon. People had these earbuds that lacked any bass response, so they went with headphones that overdid it just to feel it. Sound bars indeed have features like better separation than tinier TV speakers but still crumble apart in comparison to even very modest bookshelf speakers you can run actual speaker wire into. Let alone a sub or a proper surround setup. Likewise with Beats and other headphones, they crumble put against the humble studio monitors like mdrv6/mdr7506 that have great separation and more faithful response to the intents of the record producer (who might very well have been using those exact headphones themselves).

> because it was 1997 so what else are you going to do?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm.

Half sarcasm and half serious. Obviously there were a lot of things to do back then, but also this was a time before everyone was carrying around a device that let you contact everyone else and access information about what is going on around you. Movies were a very heavily advertised things to do, the movie theater provided both a place as well as a time to meet your friends, and watching a movie at home meant gambling that the rental place would even have what you were looking for and provided a experience that was a very noticeable step down from going to the theater.

Also, depending on where you lived, going to the movie may well have been one of the only things to do.

Somewhere, Cameron admits he rereleased Avatar to theaters ahead of Avatar 2 so it would beat Endgame. He only needed 8 million more to stay on top, he got 134.

2002 doesn't look like the interesting year to me. It seems like 2020 and the pandemic is where the most significant drop happened. So we're really looking at post pandemic recovery since that time. How much of the lower numbers are due to theater closures and / or high inflation since then?

> Fun fact: movie sales, in terms of tickets sold, peaked in 2002.

Fun fact: this is completely wrong. The cinema theaters were much more popular in the 1920s and 1930s, with about 3 times more tickets sold in the USA (out of a smaller population).

"In 1930 (the earliest year from which accurate and credible data exists), weekly cinema attendance was 80 million people, approximately 65% of the resident U.S. population (Koszarski 25, Finler 288, U.S. Statistical Abstract). However, in the year 2000, that figure was only 27.3 million people, which was a mere 9.7% of the U.S. population (MPAA, U.S. Statistical Abstract)." in Pautz, The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, Issues in Political Economy, 2002, Vol. 11. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...

Everybody is talking how tv's got better and sound got better and streaming and dvds...

It's still not the same as the cinema experience.

But! Cinema tickets used to be cheap, you'd buy some drinks in a store to smuggle in, call a girl you liked, got cheap popcorn at the stand, and for very little money got a fun evening.

Now tickets are expensive, popcorn is artificially ultra expensive, to make you buy a "menu" (drinks or sweets added) for just a bit more, better seats are even more expensive, and when you put it all together, it's cheaper to go for a proper dinner in a restaurant. Also, most of the movies suck.

I had an interesting experience taking my son to see the recent-ish Mario movie at the theatre that made me realize that the theatre business really is changing.

It was the weekend. Sunday I think. Middle of the day. I hadn't been to this particular theatre before. I bought the tickets online, picked our seats, and then we drove to the theatre. It was in a strip mall on the outer fringes of town, I think they had around 12 screens. So not tiny but not huge.

Anyway, we walk in and there is no check-in or ticket-buying counter. There were some signs with QR codes saying you could buy your tickets online, which I had already done. In fact, there really weren't many people around at all, either customers or employees. The first (and mostly only) thing you see is an elaborate concession stand with every kind of (expensive) snack you could want. I bought us a medium popcorn to share and then we wandered over to the hallway where the screens were. There was no desk or person anywhere to verify that we bought our tickets before entering the theater. I flagged down a cleaning person to ask who we showed our tickets to. He just asked which movie we were there to watch and then pointed us to the right screen.

So I don't know if this was an unusual circumstance and they just weren't checking tickets that day, or if this is just how they run this particular theater. After the movie, on the drive home, my son asks out of the blue, "Wait, did we even really have to buy the tickets online if they don't make anyone check them?" We had a good discussion about that.

That's weird. Where I am, if you buy tickets online you get a QR code. At the theater, there's someone in front who scans your QR code and gives you a physical ticket. That ticket is not really checked, but there is always someone there paying attention to folks walking in.

Most still do cursorily check tickets (sometimes at the concession stand itself) but they’d probably almost prefer you buy popcorn and no ticket.

Movie studios could care less if a billion people watch a movie or if 1 person sees it.

They care how much profit they make and what the growth in their profit margin is, as that sets their multiple on their stock price.

If it's a better strategy selling movie tickets to mostly single adult men at high prices than to families at lower prices, guess who movie studios are going to make movies for?

Movies studios reached their TAM in the West a while ago. The only way to make more money is charging more per ticket in real terms, which means a reduction in TAM

It's an even worse curve if you'd account for the huge population growth since 2002.

> Even for individual movies. For all the men-in-spandex movies, the best selling movie (by tickets sold) in modern times is Titanic, 27 years ago.

This looks incorrect, at least according to Wikipedia; its list of films by box office admissions[1] includes a few Chinese movies from the 1980s with higher numbers.

Unless the 80s don’t count as modern times - but I’d say it’s not that far from the 90s.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_by_box_office_...

There's a lot of debate in this thread about the merits of watching movies in the theater vs home, but my overall movie watching is way down, regardless of venue. I'm sure I watch less than one movie per month. I used to watch tons when I was younger.

Unrelated, I wish there were small screening theaters where small groups of people could watch films on-demand, drawing on a massive catalog.

Interestingly enough, this varies a lot between countries.

Also, you graph is way too short-sighted to say it “peaked in 2002”, as in reality it peaked in the 50s (before TV went ubiquitous) when almost ten times as many tickets were sold.