Reading the Numbers

I'm taking a few days at the beach with my extended family, thus the late posting (with likely very little to say). I was flying much of the day, so if anything important happened, certainly nobody told me. One thing I did hear from a couple of 16-year-old girls is that the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie is somewhat disappointing. While that jibes with pretty much all the reviews I've noticed, this is the first I've heard of it from the 16-year-old girl quarter. And that can't be good for the studio.

Still, though, I have to wonder nowadays how much the studio cares. As far as I can tell, this was the big movie everybody's been waiting for all summer, so it's got a massive amount of hype already built in. It's going to have a huge weekend no matter how the 16-year-old girls feel about it. And that's all the studio wants. It used to be that word of mouth was used to build a movie, but that's largely irrelevant these days. They go in quick, make as much money as they can on opening weekend, and then expect the profits to start drying up quickly. Word of mouth is for video.

I'm hardly the first person to notice this, but we're well on the way to having the film exhibition business being one strictly of blockbusters. More and more, smaller movies are coming into theatres for a short time and functioning as little more than an advertisement for the video. The entertainment media continues to read and report grosses as a guide to Hollywood's winners and losers, but I suspect that the industry itself has already moved on to a different paradigm in understanding what those numbers mean.