Several recent articles I've read have mentioned that the Motion Picture Association of America is working on ways to improve recent slump at the box office. According to stats from the MPAA, about 1.4 billion tickets were sold in the United States last year, representing a 9% drop from 2004 and the lowest total since 1997.

Speaking at the ShoWest convention of theater owners, MPAA chief Dan Glickman said his group is considering an advertising campaign to get "people excited about getting out of their homes to go to the movies." "Hollywood spends "hundreds of millions of dollars promoting individual movies but very little promoting ... movies in general," he said. "Why not?"

And who better to tell the American movie-watching public what they should be watching than the former head of the Department of Agriculture?

While Glickman begs theater owners to come up with new ways to think creatively and provide value to the movie-watching experience, there is one simple idea "Hollywood" needs to consider that would go a long way to increasing the number of people that go to their local google-plex and pay small fortunes to see the filmed entertainment:

Stop making crappy movies.

Just look at the movies that are out right now. Is anyone surprised that theaters are going empty when stuff like "Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector" is the best that the industry can come up with?

Sure, the month of March is usually a bad time for movies because the Oscars were just handed out and hardly anyone wants to release an oscar-worthy film in the early part of the voting year ("Cinderella Man" being a notable exception last year). The month of April isnt much better as it's traditionally the calm before the storm of Spring and Summer blockbusters (read: mediocre flops whose profits are tempered precariously by the amount of marketing they spend)...

But come on!

Opening this weekend we have...

"Slither" - "An alien parasite has found and infected its unlucky human host, an unwilling transporter who now must continue to infect others in order to survive." Gee, I've never seen that premise done before...

"Basic Instinct 2" Does anyone really want to see Sharon Stone's aging, dried up vagina yet again? Honestly Sharon, it wasn't that impressive the first time around. Close your legs for christ sake.


There should be no excuse for anyone to spend $11 to see a bad movie. Hollywood needs to get it's act together.

Last year had many blockbusters with great WOM: Batman Begins, ROTS, King Kong, Narnia, and Goblet of Fire. The problem is not that audiences don't like the movies and it never will be. Last year was down because there was a weak slate of family films, and the reason most won't want to admit: there were not enough big sequels. This year will solve that, and it's not coincidence that 2006 jumps well ahead of 2005 on the weekend when a massive sequel (aimed at families as it happens) opens.

"Promoting movies in general" is the dumbest idea ive ever heard. Really.

It seems likely to be as effective as the MPAA's anti-piracy marketing.

When your three movies to open the summer season are House of Wax, Kingdom of Heaven and Crash (in less than 2000 theaters, I might add), what do you expect?

Summer is the biggest time of the year for films, but studios didn't have a great lineup to excite people.

The problem is that Hollywood really has no idea what the viewing audience wants. So what they do instead is find tried and true ideas that have worked before and attempt to wrap that around the latest script. But just because an idea worked once, doesnt mean that it will work the 300th time.

The answer is ticket prices, people talking in movies, commercials.

It's not just the movies, it's that the whole experience is being tarnished by this garbage.

The movie watching experience definitely has something to do with it. You are forking out a ton of cash just to get in, then another ton of cash for overpriced snacks served by underpaid and bored theater staff, and then get to see a movie surrounded by annoying, usually obnoxious other movie watchers.

Compare that to Netflix or PPV, and watching something from the comfort of your own couch with your own system. Its easy to see why the hollywood expereince is on the backside of the bell curve.

I say widen the gap between theatrical release and DVD release, lower ticket prices (and concession prices), have more fun, interactive promotional materials in the theater (like animated cardboard standees or maybe even dressing up the lobby for a particular movie or something), and cut down the commercials before the movie. I think that'd be more effective in getting more people to the theater than cutting out the "crap-films", since we probably don't actually have more crap-films than we used to--it's just that they're more prominent to us because we take more care in choosing what films to see because of the ticket prices, etc.

Joy

How about opening more drive-ins and/or theaters, either owned independently or by major theatrical chain? But then again, maybe there'd be war between nature and human creation. Then many could lower prices.

EDIT: This idea is better than spending ads on "she's the man" at the same amount of "Ice Age 2"

Gee.. So many things haven't worked for the theaters... Over the years they suffered with ideas like:
1. Super-wide screens.
2. Double features.
3. Enjoyable cartoons.
4. Freshly cooked popcorn..
5. True matinee pricing(50%)...
6. Saturday morning serials and kid's fare......

Guess the public didn't like it...

Maybe part of the problem is that they never stuck with any one idea long enough to see if it would work. I would definitely enjoy matinee pricing and cheaper concessions.

It has to be service. Making someone dress up like a bell-hop with the dinky hat is only going to annoy the employee and make them work even less to help the customer.