Tony Earnshaw: Audience decline won’t stop the megabucks Hollywood machine

The Hollywood Reporter, bible of showbiz movers and shakers, is reporting that film attendances are at their lowest for 16 years as the Stateside and European recession continues to slide ever deeper.

“Preliminary estimates” revealed that in 2011 1.28bn people went to the movies – a 4.4 per cent drop on 2010 and the lowest figure since 1995. The all-time high was reached in 2002, with 1.57bn heading to the multiplexes. So it’s beginning to hurt. And in Hollywood it’s hurting where it matters: at the ticket office.

Let’s be frank: 1.28bn people is a huge number of bums on seats. What the Reporter is referring to is the masses – the bedrock of the United States’ cinema-going public which, like that of the UK, France, Germany, Spain and the rest of the western world, props up the big studios by shelling out to watch its blockbusters.

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How many times has a film been trumpeted as a hit via an advertising campaign that focuses on its box office gross rather than audience and critical reaction? Money drives a film’s record as a winner: how much it takes at the turnstiles against how much it cost to make. And with an average blockbuster now costing in excess of $100m, the pressure is on to make that budget back, and more besides.

So does this mean the big studios – Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox et al – will rein back on mega-dollar behemoths in favour of more modest fare? I seriously doubt it. They may make slightly fewer “tentpole” movies but they’ll still be there, filling up the summer schedules, sequel tripping over remake, scrabbling for your cash.

If Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol can still rake in $40m over the four-day New Year weekend, then people clearly have money to spend. And it’s an indicator. The foreign box office takings for the six big studios in 2011 amounted to $13.53bn – and that includes the UK. Domestic ticket sales in the US reached $10.2bn. So it’s not time to panic just yet.

Audiences have demanded spectacular entertainment since the days of DW Griffith and Cecil B De Mille. There’s nothing new in paying to be amazed. Mission: Impossible 4 is an example of how far – or how high – filmmakers are prepared to go to thrill audiences. Otherwise it would all be a little ho-hum.

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The trick is in always fulfilling audience expectations. If the big studios and their stars start to slip, then audiences will fall away and cinema as a concept will begin to decline. So it’s cyclical, cannibalistic, and self-fulfilling. Hollywood will continue to churn out fast, frenetic and fundamentally empty epics that cost hundreds of millions to shore up its reputation.

And that’s whether you, I or our colonial cousins buy tickets or not.