A regular guy’s look at the state of the movie industry (part two of three…)

The movie industry over the last year has been in somewhat of a decline and for the last six months anyone who pays attention to any of the movie websites have been hearing the back and forth between fans and the movie studios complaining about everything from the quality of films over the past few years to the cost of making movies to DVD sales cutting into movie sales to on demand video and the advent of rental by mail. Last week we looked at the fan argument that the quality of films are deteriorating, this week we will take a look at the argument that DVD sales, movie costs, video on demand, and rental by mail is affecting the Hollywood bottom line. Since last week we used the last five years as our template for comparison, this week I am going to do the same.

Movie costs:

Here is a list of the top ten movies cost over the last five years, compared to gross sales
(courtesy of www.imdb.com):

The numbers all appear pretty stable and if anything it seems the studios actually spent less money on the top ten movies than any of the last five years.

While this does not take into account big budget movies that did not make any money, and surely did take a nice chunk out of the movie studios bottom line, I did not include them here because, in the view of the movie studios, people are not seeing these films because DVD sales are eating into their theater profits. With the exception of this year, it seems that movie studios have been making more money in theater sales, so is it possible that more people are waiting to see some of these big budget movies on DVD? Let’s take a look and see how many movies not in the top ten were the biggest sellers of the last few years. Since most Summer movies were just released on DVD or have yet to be released, lets look at the last years 2001-2004 and see if we can find a trend.

Biggest theatrical DVD sales over the last four years  (thanks to www.leesmovieinfo.net):

Looking at these numbers it appears that the top theatrical DVD sales for the last four years have almost exclusively been the top ten movies of that or the previous year, and unless this trend completely reverses, this year’s movies that do not make a splash at the box office won’t make up for their lack of performance with DVD sales and do not seem to be the reason people are missing these movies in the theaters.

Another argument is that home rental is keeping people out of theaters.

Top Rentals by year (thanks to www.formovies.com):

As always, please drop me a line and let me know what you think of this week’s article at DPlace76@yahoo.com, or read my latest random musing at www.livejournal.com/users/bigdpimpin. Also, I have added a few new threads to my little part of the Forums section coincidentally titled, “The Weigh In”. Check it out. You know I wouldn’t steer you wrong.