By: MattInRC
Hollywood is off to a terrible 2013 start. Read on to learn how bad it's gotten.
While a poor start in Hollywood is always something that can be turned around, things aren't looking so pretty for a successful 2013. Continuing the trend we first discussed in January, box office numbers for February and a poor opening March weekend continue to display an ongoing problem for the industry: how to bring in the big crowds.
According to our friends at BoxOfficeMojo, February 2013's theater receipts came in at around $617 million, as compared to 2012's record $818 million. That's a change of 24% from last year and over 10% from 2008-2010. Our own calculations verify the malaise that's held down Hollywood since the new year chimed in. We compared the top 10 films in February 2012 ($729,186,032) with those of this year ($574,350,764) which indicates a slightly smaller decline of 22%. But things get worse when you add January's 26.9% drop to February, bringing the overall decline to a staggering 48%.
The evidence was already building when Hollywood in January announced a 4% decline in the number of tickets sold, a much stronger indication of performance than ticket sales. Add in a much weaker January in which only one winner emerged (Identity Thief), as well as leftover hits from 2012 like Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, The Hobbit, and other Oscar candidates, and the numbers were almost guaranteed to decline. Yet, no one either expected this kind of drop or believed the decline would continue across entire months. We pontificated the possible reasons for this decline over at our sister site, OnePerCase.net, and most of those seem to be still plaguing what's quickly becoming empty theaters across the country.
Even though several strong candidates are soon to be released, including Oz: The Great and Powerful and GI Joe: Retaliation, those are still potential summer blockbusters that have somehow been passed up for films you might not associate with summer hits, including The East on May 31st and The Smurfs 2 in August. That's not to say Joe and Oz are guaranteed failures, but it does prove that Hollywood might not think too highly of them if they've settled down into a month before even Spring gets underway. Whether audiences agree is anyone's guess, but March is already off to a terrible start: Jack the Giant Slayer and 21 and Over took in $35 million combined, and the Top 10 only took in $92 million combined, down 39% from last year.
In short, Hollywood needs to figure out how to bring their core audiences back into the mix before 2013 becomes unrecoverable.
Have you seen many 2013 films, and do you think the industry is in trouble?
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