Movie theatre attendance “is running behind last summer’s and has even fallen below that of summer 2005, a year of box-office duds that had some analysts predicting audiences were abandoning movie houses in favor of home theaters and other entertainment options,” the AP’s David Germain reported in a 7.3 piece.
“With studios offering a stronger late-season lineup than normal this year, attendance likely will pick up and lift Hollywood to a respectable summer. Still, early forecasts that Hollywood would have its first $4 billion summer now look like wishful thinking.”
The reason seems obvious to me. Attendance is down because none of the big May-June-July blockbusters — Sony’s Spider-Man 3, DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Uni’s Evan Almighty and Dreamamount’s Transformers — have really connected. They’ve all stunk of corporate-think and therefore haven’t really turned audiences on. (There’s a difference between rote and genuine enthusiasm.) The only groundswell word-of-mouthers have been Knocked Up and Once and…what else?