Ben Fritz, my friend and former Spinsanity collaborator, has a great post on his blog about this New York Times article on the alleged decline in the movie business:
There are two major problems with this piece:
1. The problem it identifies doesn't really exist (and to the extend that it does, it hardly matters)
2. [The evidence it] marshalls to prove its point is absurdly non-representative.Let's start with 1. I'll sum it up as the New York Times did: "For 13 weekends in a row, box-office receipts have been down compared with a year ago, despite the blockbuster opening of the final 'Star Wars' movie. And movie executives are unsure whether the trend will end over the important Memorial Day weekend that officially begins the summer season. Meanwhile, sales of DVD's and other types of new media continue to surge. With box-office attendance sliding, so far, for the third consecutive year, many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained - a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood."
Is box office down this year? Overall, yes, by a few points. But as my colleague Gabe Snyder pointed out in Variety a few weeks ago (subscription only, so you probably can't read it), there have been fewer wide releases this year, for various reasons. On a per movie basis, which is surely what matters, Hollywood is doing better. And of course last year there was this little aberration early in the year called "Passion of the Christ." Now maybe Hollywood should come out with more movies like that, but given how rare it is to have a mega-hit like that early in the year, it does make comparisons at this point a bit bogus.
It also seems a bit odd to say Hollywood is facing "serious new challenges" because people are spending a lot more time with DVDs. Who sells DVDs? The same studios that distribute movies at the box office. And in fact DVDs are a much higher margin business. So it's not exactly clear what the challenge here is.
But the worst thing about this article, surely, is that most of the evidence for its thesis that people are turning away from movie theaters to spend time on interactive media at home comes [from] four interviewees presented as if they are representative of a trend. But this is a not a remotely random group of people. Who are they?
-A UCLA senior
-A VP of TheFacebook.com (an Internet social networking company for college students)
-A VP of IGN (an online media company that primarily covers videogames)
-A "video game entrepreneur"The first "man on the street" seems like a random enough choice. But the other three? Do these choices strike anyone else as laughably biased? Apparently it didn't bother the editors at the Times.
But to me, it doesn't exactly illustrate a point about the public to discover that three people who work in online media and video games spend a lot of time online and playing video games. And thus they have less time for movies. Someone who works at TheFacebook spends his free time online? A VP at IGN says " video games increasingly have taken up time she otherwise might spend watching television or going to the and prefers that to the movie theater? How shocking!
I can't remember the last time I saw a better case of searching out the evidence to fit your thesis.
Here's the best part: two of the "man on the street" interviews were with someone from Thefacebook, which the Times just profiled on May 26, and the "video game entrepreneur" Brian Goble, who Holson quoted in a different story two weeks ago. Clearly Holson just piggybacked on that reporting. Lazy, lazy, lazy.
Comments