Outdoors this summer, the sun was hot enough to pop corn. Inside the multiplexes, though, it was noticeably milder, in what industry analysts call a "tepid" season.
As you're reading this, summer movie grosses are being scrutinized as the Romans once studied animal entrails to divine the future.
Although rising admission prices have given the box office a slight uptick over last summer, the number of tickets sold appears to be the lowest since the summer of 1997.
Estimates are that the 2010 summer box office will be $4.35 billion, a 2.3 percent increase over the 2009 figure of $4.25 billion, says Paul Dergarabedian, industry analyst for hollywood.com. He projects that 552 million moviegoers will have bought tickets, a 2.5 percent drop from 566 million in summer '09.
What accounts for the box-office blahs? Hollywood analysts disagree, but the most frequently cited causes are:
Too many sequels.
Industry dependence on 3-D effects over three-dimensional characters.
Costlier tickets coupled with lower-quality films.
Social networks accelerating the speed of negative word-of-mouth.
Despite fare such as the heady Inception and heartwarming Toy Story 3, "it's been a lackluster summer," says Brandon Gray, president of boxofficemojo.com, which tracks Hollywood revenues.
He ascribes the box-office blues to "an overreliance on sequels and remakes" like Shrek Forever After and The A-Team.
With the exception of Toy Story 3, he says, "most were sequels for the sake of sequels rather than movies people wanted to see." Sex and the City 2, anyone?
For Dergarabedian, sequels are an asset, not a liability. "Last summer there were 10 sequels released, this year only seven," he says. "Four of them - Toy Story 3, Iron Man 2, Twilight: Eclipse, and Shrek Forever - were in the top five grossing films of the summer. Maybe there weren't enough sequels," he joked.
Asked to write an equation to explain the decline of summer ticket-buyers, Dergarabedian offers: "Higher ticket prices plus lower-quality fare equals unhappy moviegoers."
Although the national average for a movie ticket is $7.88 (which takes into account reduced prices for children and seniors), a ticket for a 3-D film carries an added surcharge of $3 to $5.
