So far this year, movie revenues are up by 7 percent and attendance has increased by 2.5 percent over last year. With the record-breaking summer season now over, and only "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," remaining of major sequels lined up for the winter months, it will be interesting to see how the industry performs in the last part of the year.
The summer brought its first season with over $4 billion in domestic revenue, and will finish at about $4.15 billion through Labor Day.
With "Halloween" ending and leading off the summer and fall, its surprise numbers has to give some encouragement as the year goes on. "Halloween" will end up about $10 to $12 million over the projected four-day weekend, with most thinking it would only bring in around $20 million.
The one down side for the year was it wasn't close to reaching the record of tickets sold for a summer, as overall ticket sales came in at 606 million, while the record year of 2002 ended with 653.4 million tickets sold. Sales grew from the increased price of tickets.
What Hollywood did this year that worked was keeping with entertaining films, rather than the mostly irrelevant polictical statement films that most movie buffs reject. If they continue with the entertainment side of it, they should do well over the long haul. It they get tempted to do their cause-related fare, they'll find themselves in deep trouble again, as people have enough problems in their daily lives to want to go see filmmakers showing one more problem to have to take in.
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