Broke People Just Aren’t As Excited By Crappy Movies As They Used To Be
Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Those who know JDA know that if there’s one thing I am not into (Bernanke aside), it’s movies. Don’t bother making movie references that every other 20-something American female should know because chances are I genuinely have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. The only reason I’ve seen Star Wars is because I was engaged to a movie nut who insisted I partake in the classics (yeah he may have been a bit of a nerd on top of it). Odds are I nodded off after the first 20 minutes and if I managed to stay awake through Clint Eastwood marathons, it was out of love and certainly not because I actually wanted to watch any of them.
That being said, is it all surprising that movie-goers stayed home this summer? Please! We’re in the middle of a f*#king recession for Christ’s sake, if you’ve been unemployed for 99 weeks you can’t afford Netflix, let alone $20 a pop for some crap 3D flick. Ironically I got in two movies this summer (the Jr Jr Deputy is lucky I love him enough to pay for and – worse! – sit through a movie every now and then) but hey, I still make money and don’t have a house I can’t afford to worry about.
Summer movie attendance fell to the lowest level since 1997, while soaring ticket prices produced record revenue for Hollywood studios and theater owners.
The number of tickets sold from the first weekend of May through the U.S. Labor Day holiday is expected to drop 2.6 percent to 552 million, Hollywood.com Box-Office said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. That would be the lowest attendance since summer moviegoers bought 540.3 million tickets in 1997.
“The movies just didn’t excite people the way they needed to,” Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com Box-Office, said in an interview. “When you raise prices and perceive that quality goes down, you have a major problem.”
Yeah whatever, I wasn’t watching movies in 1997 either. Good for you, America, don’t you dare set foot in a theater again until they at least start pumping out better crap than every Rob Schneider movie ever made.
