Making Sense of Hollywood’s Decline

The big, but quietly reported news out of Hollywood this week is that domestic movie attendance is at a 16-year low.

That’s obviously a pretty big problem, especially when you take into account that the population has been steadily rising.

The theories behind the decline are what you’d expect: ticket prices have gone up too much, the quality of movies has dropped, the movie going experience has become terrible because everyone in the theater is a jerk, competition with the internet, etc.

While I’m sure these have all played a role, after thinking about my own moviegoing habits, I think it’s possible Americans have just lost interest in the movies.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, movies completely consumed my life to the point that I majored in film at college.

It was a great time to be a movie fan. Every two years the envelope on special effects, makeup, plot/thematic matter was pushed into whole new territory. I’m sure folks growing up in the 1970s felt the exact same way. In fact, I think you can say this of almost every previous decade.

Growing up and into college, I probably saw two movies a month in the theaters and would see a movie I really liked twice. Today, I’m lucky to see maybe four movies a year and haven’t seen a movie in the theaters twice since 1997.

As an adult, I have more money and time to spend on movies than I did when I was growing up and a student, so this shift is a bit paradoxical. While I suppose I have other leisure interests that eat up my time that I didn’t have then, I’ve also given up many from those years, such as video games.

What’s changed, is that all it used to take was an intriguing movie trailer to get me to buy a ticket – and I saw a lot of terrible movies to the credit of the people who make the trailers. Today, I religiously visit Apple.com to see the latest trailers, but almost nothing excites me.

I don’t think this is adult cynicism, but saturation. After thirty years of watching movies, everything new leaves me feeling “meh” – I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see. There was once a thrill there that is now gone.

I think there is evidence that shows I’m not alone in feeling this way.

While domestic attendance keeps going down, overseas attendance continues to increase.

If you believe my saturation theory, this makes sense because the overseas film industry infrastructure is farther behind in its lifecycle than it is here – only recently have other countries added more theaters and increased their own domestic movie production.

Now I realize some of what I’ve said sounds something like movies are losing out in the battle for our entertainment dollars to other forms of leisure, but the problem with this theory is that it views leisure as a zero-sum game. That is, there are not time slots during the day that are devoted to leisure where if you’re surfing the internet during that two hour slot, therefor time spent with all other leisure activities is diminished. But people embrace this theory because they just don’t want to accept that nothing lasts forever, that tastes and interests eventually change.