Flipping through entertainment magazines and television shows, the headlines are all the same when it comes to the box office – it’s tanking.

Various reasons are said for the decline in box office revenue, such as people aren’t going to movies anymore because the prices are too high or because the quality has deteriorated. Entertainment Weekly reported that 2005 was the lowest year since 1985 for box office revenue compared to the year before it.

However, the headlines are misleading – to a certain extent anyway.

“Not that the box office isn’t going down, but what it tends to perpetuate is a sense that Hollywood is disappearing, when in fact it is becoming increasingly more connected to its audience,” says John McCullough, assistant professor in the department of film at York University in Toronto.

He calls the current Hollywood “Global Hollywood” because movie studios also have their hands in other revenue-generating mediums such as television, the Internet and print. “Global Hollywood” is also looking at a worldwide audience, not just North America.

“So you see shrinkage of North American box office enormously. Throughout the ’90s, the industry was cognizant of that but they made up for that by selling more than enough internationally. So they can still do that but the strategies for how you make an international hit become less and less dependable. So it used to be you’d try to make a ‘Titanic,’ or you try to make something you (can) travel with. These (are) films that were called films that had legs,” he says, citing “Mission Impossible: III” as a recent example.

“MI: III” has grossed $133.4 million in North America so far, but it has grossed over $228 million worldwide, making it one of the top grossing movies of the year so far. It is expected the same will happen with “Superman Returns,” which relatively tanked at the North American box office, but is expected to do well internationally.

The media also speculates that one of the reasons the box office is in a slump in North America is due to too many of the big budget films, like “MI: III” and “Superman Returns.” So is Hollywood spending more money than it is making and that is why many films are no longer breaking even, let alone making a profit, at the North American box office? No, says McCullough.

“Hollywood has really figured out its business that way, so while we do get these big ones, they also have a ton of stuff that is contracted out that is a much safer bet, that will clearly make far more profit.

“So you see, traditions that should have never got, in the context of thinking about international mark in films, things like ‘Clerks’ or even the Jay and Silent Bob films, that is something that never should have taken off. Richard Linklater, after making ‘Slackers,’ should never have been able to make another film. But it is within the logic of that ‘Global Hollywood’ that (those) films find a market,” he says, adding that as long as Hollywood continues to invest in films across a wide spectrum, they will make up the money that higher budget films did not bring in.

“Because what they’ve found is that the attempts to get global audiences with kind of generic, conventional fare like ‘MI: III’ or whatever (are successful, but) they also find that that opens up niche markets for things like Jay and Silent Bob, you know things that make you scratch your head. And because Hollywood has their fingers in all of those pots at the moment, they can’t fail to win,” he says.

Measuring a movie’s success is not new to the current “Global Hollywood” state we live in, either. Both “Old Hollywood” (when Hollywood controlled the production, distribution and exhibition of a film) and “New Hollywood” (which arrived in the 1970s after the studio system was order to break up its monopolies) also measured a film’s success to it.

However, what is new with Global Hollywood is that a movie’s box office revenue is no longer the only measure of a film’s success or failure. Because most of the major film studios also have holdings in other areas of media, where a movie fails in box office, it can more than make up for in other areas.

“So now look at ‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ it’s a theme park ride and a movie, an international movie with legs (and it) ends up generating revenue in other types of synergistic connected revenue pools. So that’s really where Global Hollywood differs from the first two types of Hollywood, in that the box office receipts measuring the success of any one company is no longer an issue because they will get their revenue elsewhere: merchandising, TV, everything they are tied into,” McCullough says.

Despite this fact that the box office is not the sole predicator in whether a movie is a success or failure, McCullough says the studio still sees the box office as an important part of their marketing for a film because it is a way to let the public know the film is there. He says that a film just cannot go straight to DVD, because the way a big budget film proves it is superior and important is to showcase it in a theatre. A good example of this is “Superman Returns.” You can go and see this movie in a regular theatre, or you can see it in an Imax theatre – with 20 minutes of the film in 3D.

If anyone in the movie industry has suffered due to the decline in the box office and the speed in which movies are now pulled from theatres and released on DVD, it is the second run theatres.

You know the ones I’m talking about: about 10 years ago there used to be theatres all over the city, which charged dirt cheap prices to see a film months after it had been released into the regular theatres. But because a film is so quickly released on DVD after being in the theatres, there is no need for these second run theatres to exist anymore.

McCullough says the biggest problem with the myth of the box office slump is due to the fact that “Global Hollywood” owns many of the venues where this information is coming from. So, in a sense, when you read about how drastically the box office is declining, it is usually from a company which has ties with a movie studio, and that is why the report is there.

“It’s like ‘Global Hollywood’ telling you the box office is going down. It’s funny now that the idea that somehow entertainment magazine shows are separate from Hollywood is a total myth. This is the news about Hollywood, but no it’s not. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, but one can easily see the connection, so (take) those shows with a grain of salt,” he says.






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