Hollyroit
Interesting commentary piece at NYT that compares (not contrasts) Hollywood and Detroit. Link. Excerpt:
Consumers today face an unprecedented array of choices for how to spend their transportation and entertainment dollars. And with each passing year, they seem less likely to choose to spend them on the stuff cranked out of Detroit and Hollywood assembly lines. In the postwar decade, the height of the American century, both rode high. The Big Three - General Motors, Ford and Chrysler - held down an astonishing 95 percent of the United States car market in 1955. In 1948, writes Edward Jay Epstein, author of "The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood," some 90 million Americans, or 65 percent of the nation's population, went to a movie each week. That year, with TV in its infancy and the only real competition radio, Americans bought a whopping 4.6 billion tickets.
But decades of competition from upstarts - Japanese and Korean automakers for Detroit, television, video games and the Internet for Hollywood - have killed these two incumbents by a thousand cuts. In June, the no-longer-so-Big Three controlled just 58.3 percent of the United States market. Last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, only about 10 percent of the population managed to make it to the multiplex each week, and the number of tickets sold slumped 2.4 percent to a little more than 1.5 billion. So far this year, according to Exhibitor Relations, attendance is down another 7.8 percent.
Another site offers this list of reasons that Hollywood is struggling:
1. Hollywood cannot control its marketing costs or star salaries. The growing importance of DVDs increases the "needle in the haystack" problem for any single film and thus locks studios into more marketing, creating a vicious spiral.
2. TV is now so much better, and offers artists greater creative freedom. Why watch movies?
3. The Internet is outcompeting cinema, whether at the multiplex or on DVD.
4. Big TV screens are keeping people at home, which lowers box office receipts. This also hurts the long-term prospects of many DVDs.
5. The demand for DVDs has fallen because movie lovers have completed their core collections, just as the demands for classical CDs have fallen.
5. The demand for DVDs was due to fall in any case. Forget the collectors, you buy DVDs to have a stock on hand so you don't have to run out to the video store on short notice. Now everyone has a stock. Stocks must be replenished every now and then, but there is no longer a large new cohort simultaneously building up a stock from scratch.
Link.
We can't shed a tear for Hollywood. Sure, there's nostalgia, but from Communist infiltration to insidious efforts to undermine America's moral moorings, far too much bad has accompanied its good entertainment.
