The Book of Masks Homepage

The Most Recent Rabbit-Hole

For the most part I've been keeping up with publishing schedules, but I've been completely ignoring everything else. Part of this is another BoM enthusiasm crash I've been trying to manage, and part of it is because of a recent fascination with other things. I tend to plunge down rabbit holes when I trip over an interesting one, and lately I've gotten fixated on box-office statistics.

If you pay even a small amount of attention to the movies, you'll know that theatrical box office hasn't exactly recovered from the Recent Unpleasantness, and over the last few weeks I've gotten weirdly interested in quantifying the damage. This has involved pulling together box office data from over the last thirty years to examine trends and construct base lines. I've discovered all sorts of little tidbits along the way. For instance, did you know that:

* Year in and year out, no matter how many movies are released, the top 200 movies always account for 98% to 99% of the box office. In 2019, for instance, the top 200 movies generated 97.9% of box office revenues, leaving the other 910 movies released that year to fight it out for the remaining 2.1%. And the top 100 movies regularly generate 90% of ticket sales. This means that approximately 85% of movies released in given year will perform "below average."

* The major studios (and their art-house divisions) never release more than 15% of all movies in a given year, but routinely capture 80% (or more) of the box office.

* In 1990, only 16% of the box office went to "franchise films" (sequels, remakes, reboots, "cinematic universes," etc.). By 2019, that percentage had risen to 61%.

* Typically, a major studio will release 20 to 25 movies a year. Typically, half of its box office gross will come from just four of those movies. And typically its single best-performing movie will account for 20% of its box office.

* Wanna play like you're a movie mogul? Shuffle a regulation deck and "buy" twenty cards (face down) from it for $100. Roll two die and add that amount to the $100 spend. Then, for each number card (2 through 10) in your twenty-card hand collect $3. For each jack in your hand collect $8; for each queen collect $10; for each king collect $15; for each ace collect $30. This, approximately, is the kind of gamble a studio chief faces each time he assembles a slate of movies.

* The Recent Unpleasantness may have kicked the struts out from under the movie business, but those struts have been wobbly for some time. Sure, US-Canadian box office receipts rose 24% between 2002 and 2019, but ticket sales fell 22%, and the rate of movie-going (the number of times the average US-Canadian goes to the movies in a year) fell 31% during the same time frame. In fact, in 2019 the rate of movie-going (3.78 times a year) was lower than had ever been recorded. Put it this way: people probably went to the movies more often back when Germany had a Kaiser than they did the year that "Avengers: Endgame" came out.

* As for how bad the damage has been to the domestic box office: We won't have official numbers until January 1, when the last of the holiday would-be-blockbusters have opened and the books on the year can be closed, but at the moment things are on track to a $7 billion box office. That would be down almost 40% from 2019 (the last pre-pandemic year), and if you factor in ticket-price inflation, it's closer to a 50% drop. Pretty scary, considering that theaters are supposed to be fully open and unrestricted. Not even during the Great Depression did movie theaters experience such a high-to-low contraction.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing. I think I've gathered and saved up most of the data I've been seeking, so now I'm going to try catching up around here.