Most Americans are not, for the most part, into catching new movies at the local plex. Partly because they’re streaming films at home, okay, but mainly because they’re lazy, low-energy, heavy-lidded types.
A recent Statista chart shows that one out of five Americans will pay to visit a megaplex about once a month. These are your basic go-getters, life-gulpers, active adventurers, and vigorous content-streamers at home. People with a pulse generally watch a lot of films, read lots of books, go on hikes, go out to restaurants, visit Paris or Rome every three or four years and so on.
Put another way, one in five are awake and alive with a gleam in their eye and the rest are on life support — sleeping a lot, eating shitty foods, wearing hush puppies, taking naps on the couch and walking around with glazed-over expressions.
54% of the populace pays to see movies in theatres “less often than once a month“, which probably means they go four or five times a year, if that. Another 14% don’t go out to movies at all. 8% attend “several times a month.”
Today’s news, courtesy of Variety‘s Brent Lang, is that Netflix isn’t cutting into theatrical viewing.
“A new study conducted by EY’s Quantitative Economics and Statistics group finds that people who go to movies in theaters more frequently also consume more streaming content,” Lang reports. “That flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of box office sages, who grimly ascribe flatlining theatrical attendance to the growing popularity of digital entertainment companies.
“If the study’s findings are accurate, it would appear that the two forms of entertainment consumption are more complementary than cannibalistic. The study found, for instance, that respondents who visited a movie theater nine times or more in the last 12 months consumed more streaming content than consumers who visited a movie theater only once or twice over the past year. Those who saw nine or more movies at the cinema averaged 11 hours of weekly streaming compared to the seven hours of streaming reported on average by those who saw one to two movies at the multiplexes.”
Bottom line: Most Americans are living dead-to-the-world lives, but 20% are going for the gusto. Either way Netflix isn’t discouraging movie-theatre attendance all that much.
