It seems to have been a rocky start to the new year for Hollywood. Last week’s top 12 movies brought in revenues that were 10.7% down on the same period last year, and last year was a bad year for the US box office. Failure to Launch, The Shaggy Dog and The Hills Have Eyes made up the top three films and had a combined earnings of $56.1m (£32.4m), down on the $64.4m (£37.2m) taken by the top three movies in the same weekend last year — Robots, The Pacifier and Be Cool. All that despite the fact that two of the top three are remakes.
It’s generally thought that the number of high-profile sequels and remakes will make 2006 a much better box office year than 2005. The US box office took a 6% dip last year, although audience figures (the number of people visiting cinemas) actually dropped by 9%, which sounds bad until you consider there was a 9% in box office worldwide, not just the US (the UK actually saw a rise and was one of very few places to buck the trend).
In the face of that, movie budgets actually dropped by $2.5 million on average, but the cost of promoting them went up by 5%. This budget drop was borne out by the Oscar nominees. The big-budget blockbusters certainly lost out there, with all but one (Munich) of the five films up for Best Film costing less than $14 million. Maybe Hollywood has finally learnt that a big budget doesn’t guarantee a winning film, but I doubt it (previous experience bears fruit here, even relatively mediocre blockbuster successes often make more money than successful independent films, as I keep pointing out, because the box office isn’t Hollywood’s main income stream anymore).
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