What factors influence ticket sales? Movie executives, producers, and investors have spent millions of dollars on research to parse out trends in ticket sales. Yet despite all these efforts, trends continue to defy expectations. For instance, during the summer of 2005, studio executives expected to rake in huge profits with blockbusters like Bewitched and Stealth. However, the big money pictures of summer 2005 included oddball R-rated comedies, like Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Theater movies now must compete against a range of other entertainment options, including DVD movies, videogames, and other interactive media. What's worse, marketing to an ever more distracted audience requires ever more aggressive ad campaigns. Today, even if a picture breaks even domestically in terms of its box office ticket sales, it can still be considered a flop in terms of overall profitability. That being said, international movie ticket sales still garner tremendous cash for studios. The advent of digital film projection technology may galvanize the struggling industry. Championed by forward thinking directors like George Lucas, digital projection technology may soon save theaters on the order of $50 million a year on film shipping and storage costs alone, and make it easier for individual theaters to pull films which don't garner good ticket sales. A movie usually lives and dies by how it does on opening weekend. After opening weekend, movies' ticket sales typically drop off precipitously. If a movie doesn't shine opening weekend, it often gets pulled by the studio almost immediately. Of course, what studios lose in slow opening weekend ticket sales, they often make up through DVD marketing campaigns. Movie ticket collectors oftentimes make arrangements with theaters to gather "used" stubs. Serious ticket collectors place their finds in albums to prevent environmental deterioration.
|
