Coming to a Theater Near You.

MOTION picture theaters; MOTION picture industry; FILM box office revenue; THEATER audiences; CONSUMER preferences; CONSUMER attitudes; DIGITAL media; DVD players

HOLLYWOOD (Los Angeles, Calif.); LOS Angeles (Calif.); CALIFORNIAReport Available

This article discusses the concern in Hollywood with the drop in ticket sales this summer to movie theatres. "Newsweek" asked some of the brightest minds and biggest brokers in the film business to predict how movies and moviegoing will be different 10 years from now. Television, cable, video, video-on-demand, DVD--all of these have just created additional markets for movies to live on. The average cost of producing a studio movie leveled off last year at $63.6 million, but it still costs more than $30 million, on average, to market each one. This puts Hollywood in a vicious cycle: movies cost so much to make that they have to appeal to the largest number of people to make a profit, but then the movies feel so generic or predictable that audiences stay away. Moviemakers will need to come up with a way to make movies less expensively that appeal to a wider audience and movie theatres need to come up with innovative ways to draw people away from their televisions and TiVos and back to the cinemas.