Reading one of those many articles about how much money Endgame made this weekend eventually lead me to this chart of inflation adjusted movie grosses: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weekends/?pagenum=1&sort=gross&order=DESC&adjust_yr=2019&p=.htm . Something that struck me is the older movies on there generally made far less of their total gross on the opening weekend. Whereas stuff in the 21st century tends to make 20-30% of its total gross on the opening weekend.
I tried Googling a bit to get more information on this phenomenon, but I couldn’t find anything really definitive. In some cases (like the original Star Wars in 1977, made only ~2% of its gross the opening weekend), a very good movie didn’t receive a ton of promotion, and ended up showing for an extremely long time after it was much more successful than expected. But then Empire Strikes Back, a hugely anticipated sequel, still only made ~5% of its gross the opening weekend. So it doesn’t seem to entirely be the modern Hollywood hype machine in effect.
Another major effect I can think of is that now we have these huge multiplex theaters, and big movies are showing on far more screens than before. Is that really the difference? I would have expected that change to create more of a “long tail” effect for successful movies, where they could potentially stay playing for months and months and months on one or two screens of a theater with 10+ screens instead of being pushed out as soon as another big movie opens. Or am I misunderstanding how this change affected distribution of big blockbuster movies? Maybe now there are way fewer second-run theaters than there used to be?
What am I missing here?
Submitted April 29, 2019 at 07:34AM by TheSkiGeek http://bit.ly/2ULvvyb