![]() The strategy of “blockbusterization” of the movie business has been in effect for years. What matters to movie theaters these days are blockbusters, because theaters are getting their clocks cleaned on the lesser fare that people now watch routinely at home streamed from numerous services and studios, including Disney, Amazon, and Netflix.īut blockbusters – if sufficiently hyped – still draw people to theaters, even though not enough people. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” was the number 1 top grossing movie in 2021, with gross revenues of $614 million. Given a choice, as is now quite often the case, lots of people ended up watching the new release at home. The theatrical window was forced on consumers to benefit movie theaters. ![]() During the pandemic, movie studies have shortened and outright abandoned the theatrical window that used to give movie theaters a monopoly on showing new releases for three months. The structural issues for the movie theater business are huge: Those issues now include the streaming channels that the movie studios have set up to sell new releases directly to consumers. ![]() In 2021, box office revenues produced an uptick from the collapsed lockdown levels in 2020 but it wasn’t nearly enough: At $4.6 billion, box office sales were down by 50% from the long-gone year 2002: But they declined in 2019 by nearly 6% and collapsed in 2020. Fewer people went to the movies, but each spent more.īox office revenues kept growing as higher ticket prices made up for lower ticket sales, and that sort of worked: In 2018, box office revenues rose to a record of $12 billion. They installed bars to sell overpriced food and beer. Over the years, movie theaters countered the structural decline in moviegoers by jacking up prices of tickets and popcorn and sodas, and by offering big comfortable chairs to justify the higher prices. These escapades, at the expense of its gullible meme-stock fans, allowed AMC to raise large amounts of money that it can now burn. On Friday, AMC’s shares closed at $17.97, the lowest since May, and down 75% from the intraday peak. They should have gone to the movies instead. And to its credit, AMC was selling a huge number of shares in Q2, at huge prices, to whatever gullible meme-stock jockeys were out there. Then the meme-crowd got a hold of them, and the price spiked amid ridiculous volatility to over $72 a share intraday on June 2, with a closing high of $62.55 that day. In early January 2021, with bankruptcy being a real possibility, AMC’s shares were trading in the $2 range. In Q3, AMC’s total revenues from all activities, despite the superbly touted Labor Day weekend success, were still down by 42% from Q3 2019. ![]() In Q2 last year, AMC became infamous in the history of movie theaters for having sold more shares than movie tickets, as it’s trying to fund its huge losses, and as the meme-stock crowd was a lot more excited about buying its shares and driving up their prices than about buying movie tickets. And movie theaters were open in Q3 – those that were still around. We could guess what’s in store for the overall US movie theater industry in 2021, based on what its largest player, AMC, reported so far for 2021.ĪMC’s revenues from just ticket sales in Q3, despite the hugely hyped Labor Day weekend blockbuster numbers of “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” plunged by 47% from Q3 2019, to $425 million.įor the first three quarters of 2021, AMC’s revenues from ticket sales plunged by 70% from the same period in 2019, to just $728 million. Just 499 million tickets were sold in 2021, while streaming boomed: ![]() Then came the pandemic, and in 2020, amid the lockdowns, ticket sales collapsed.īut in 2021, with theaters reopened, the number of tickets sold was still down by 59.4% from 2019 and by 68% from the peak in 2002, according to movie data provider The Numbers. By 2019, sales were down by 22% from the peak, with 1.23 billion tickets sold. Movie theater ticket sales peaked in 2002 at 1.58 billion tickets. A slew of competitors with their own studies and streaming services have sprung up, such as Netflix and Amazon. They’ve gotten hammered by how Americans increasingly watch movies: at home. The number of movie tickets sold in the US have been on the decline for nearly two decades, despite population growth. The pandemic just accelerated the structural change by a quantum leap. ![]()
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