LOL: Movie Audiences Shrank by 50% Over the Past Four Years

Get woke, go broke.

And also: They're only making three kinds of movies now, and two of those are superhero movies. And people are getting very tired of those.

Ticket prices continue rising, and more screens are devoted to higher-cost IMAX and 3D screenings. When you adjust for the cost of tickets, the theater audiences of 2022 were only 48% as numerous as those of 2018.

"The Way of Water" doesn't change the current reality any more than "Maverick" did, which is this: In the last four years, theatrical attendance has declined by about 50 percent.

Box office for 2022 ended a little under $7.4 billion domestic, with $26 billion worldwide. That fell far short of the year's weakest projections, a consensus first stated in December 2021 by financial analyst Gower Street and repeated widely in the media: $9.2 billion domestic and $33.2 billion worldwide.

As for calculating that attendance drop: The last full pre-Covid year of 2019 generated a domestic box-office total of $11.3 billion, down from $11.9 billion in 2018. Those numbers came at lower ticket prices, by approximately 20 percent or more. (Exhibitor trade association NATO still declines to announce a current average ticket price, which it has not updated since 2019.)

Based on today's admission costs, the 2018 domestic box-office total would be over $14 billion. Back out of the totals to calculate admissions, and we reach a dire conclusion: Theatrical attendance in 2022 is about 52 percent of 2018. The massive success of "Maverick" and "The Way of Water" -- not to mention no official tracking of actual admissions -- tends to obscure that reality.

Even though Avatar 2 is a hit -- $1.5 billion and counting -- that's not enough to keep Disney's stock from falling, after multiple flops and disappointments from Marvel, as well as lower attendance at their wildly overpriced theme parks. Disney stock value is down 45%, after its worst year since 1974, when it was doubted if Disney could even go on.

Here's some more Woke Entertainment news:

Videogame review and Woke Political Sermonizing channel G4TV -- which has now died a second time -- is confirmed to have been the lowest rated cable channel of all cable channels, struggling to even attract 10,000 viewers nationwide.

In fact, it averaged one thousand viewers. Nationwide. On TV.

This is like CNN-level ratings.

[P]er an overview of the metric analysis agency's findings shared by IndieWire, G4 had the worst prime time audience numbers of all 126 standard cable channels currently offered to American audiences.

How bad was G4 2.0's last place finish? During its brief run from November 2021 to October 2022, the network managed to pull an average of only 1,000 viewers during the period of 8 PM - 11 PM every Monday through Friday.

For comparison the other network which debuted this year alongside G4, the televenovella dedicated Galanovelas/TL Novelas, came in 114th with 15,000 average viewers.

Just above G4 in the ratings were the outdoor hunting-oriented network Pursuit Channel, which ranked 125 with 2,000 average prime time viewers, and the foreign MENA region sports network beIN Sports, which ranked 124 with 3,000 average prime time viewers.

Woke sociopath "Frosk" is "not easy on the eyes" generally, but Bounding Into Comics has really picked out some pictures of her that make her look even worse than usual.

DC Comics is determined to drive their already-diminished value all the way down to hell. Their newest story has Joker becoming pregnant -- of course -- with a baby made of "mud," which is, of course, a censor-friendly way of saying "excrement."

Who is this for?

The latest chapter in the Joker's nefarious story arc may be the DC Comics arch villain's most unusual yet: He becomes pregnant.

In the latest issue of DC Comics' series, "The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing," Batman's nemesis actually carries and gives birth to a child.

If that sounds strange, that's the way the graphic novel company intended it. On its website, DC Comics advertised the issue as containing Joker's "most bizarre caper yet."

Readers may be tempted to think this is part of DC's attempt to do some woke, LGBTQ-inclusive storytelling with The Joker being a transgender man undergoing a typical pregnancy, though it's not quite that simple.

In this volume, created by Matthew Rosenberg and Carmine Di Giandomenico, the "Clown prince of Crime" becomes pregnant by some unnatural curse and gives birth in a vomit-inducing way, literally.

Or in for a "bumpy ride," as they say.

Why not add to Hollywood's woes and cut the cord?

Here's an update on my experience cutting the cord.

I only occasionally miss cable. You can't get things like Fox or the other cable channels without paying $60 per month for a service that essentially duplicates cable. Which takes money from the cable companies themselves, but doesn't actually save you that much money.

I think people are reluctant to cut the cord because they don't know what will happen when they do. Well, what will happen is that you'll watch less TV, and what you do watch will be stuff you seek out, instead of stuff that's scheduled or pushed to you.

You'll probably wind up watching a lot of crap movies and TV shows from the 70s and 80s, stuff that runs for free on Pluto and Tubi and FreeVee and a bunch of other apps (which make themselves look like a cable company's offerings, to help you feel that you're in familiar territory). But that's not so bad watching stuff from the 70s and 80s, because it's not any worse than the crap they're making today. And there's a lot less men making out and Stronk Empowered Women.

I wind up watching oddball stuff, like The People That Time Forgot and stuff from the 70s I wanted to see when I was a kid but didn't. Or I just watched this "Ozploitation" movie, Turkey Shoot, which is yet another Most Dangerous Game/Hunger Games hunt movie. "FiFi" from Mad Max was in it, as was Olivia Hussey from Romeo and Juliet. Was it good? Eh, no, but... is most stuff good? No, it's not.

There are a bunch of Italian movies in Italian language that I can watch, which is helpful with learning the language. That kind of thing isn't available on normie cable.

You can get over-the-air broadcast channels through a digital antenna. I never hooked mine up, though I hear they're pretty good.

Only occasionally is the cord-cut an actual problem or inconvenience. Most of the time you are exchanging Currently Produced Domestic Crap for Previously Produced Domestic Crap or Previously and/or Currently Produced Foreign Crap.

As for pay channels, it's expensive to subscribe to more than one or two of them, but the Zillennials have a work-around for that. I think they call it "cycling." They just sign up for a channel for a couple of months, and watch all the content from that channel that they're interested in. Then they cancel it. They hop around the different channels doing this, so that they're only paying for a couple of channels per month, but when they are subscribed to those channels, there's stuff on them they actually haven't seen yet.

They wait a year for the channels they've cycled to build up again with stuff they're interested in before re-subscribing.

Sometimes, if you really want to see something only available through cable, you're just going to have to ask a friend or family member who still has cable if you can come over and watch his TV. Which isn't a terrible thing to do, anyway.

If there are just a couple of shows on cable you think are must-watch, you can just buy the season. I always buy the Always Sunny seasons. And I used to buy What We Do in the Shadows and Rick and Morty, before they got lame. They're like $25 per season, I think. It may sound like a lot, but if you only have a few shows you must watch, it's not that expensive. You're saving money on cable, after all, so you have some "house money" to play with.

And, as I said, if you really just want cable, you can subscribe to a service like Sling which basically just re-duplicates your cable package. Maybe subscribing to Sling would be a good "in-between" step for would-be cord-cutters until they can figure out how to live without cable. Once they get used to watching TV through apps, then they can decide to cancel Sling.

posted by Ace at 04:25 PM

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