p2pnet news view | P2P | Movies:- “Gah! This is the type of article that will make your blood boil!”

That’s Andrew in an email from Australia.

What’s upsetting him is a Reuters story which has Warner Bros bragging about ” ‘breaking records’ and how some of this years release have been the ‘best yet’.”

“Quote,” quotes Andrew, “The studio’s seasonal performance has yielded an industry-best market share of 23 percent. Paramount copped the season’s silver medal with $874 million so far and a 21 percent share; Disney is third with $604 million and 15 percent.”

But as Andrew well knows, every year it’s the same old same old.

Dan ‘The Joker’ Glickman, the guy fronting Hollywood’s MPAA (Motionless Picture Association of America), spends a lot of time making statements about how file sharing is devastating the poor old multi-billion-dollar mega-studios, and how thousands of hapless support workers are being thrown onto the streets to fend for themselves because of all the jobs being lost to kids with camcorders.

Nonetheless, every year Hollywood reports even bigger eye-popping, mind-bending profits than the year before and somehow, the lamescream media never seem to notice this glaringly obvious disparity.

Here’s Andrew quoting Reuters again.

“This one’s even better, quote, ‘All told, when receipts are calculated through Labor Day, summer box office will finish north of summer 2007’s record $4.16 billion. But with 3D premiums driving a big rise in average ticket prices, there’s scant chance of beating summer 2004’s admissions record of 642 million tickets sold after accounting for inflation’.

“And one more quote, ‘We have 10 films to release by the end of the year, so it looks to me that we’re going to break our record again,’ Warners domestic distribution president Dan Fellman says. ‘But we’ll have to take it one picture at a time’.”

Meanwhile, what of other near-(according to them)destitute studios?

To quote Reuters:

“Paramount had five summer releases, led by the season’s top grosser, the DreamWorks-produced ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,’ which this weekend will reach $400 million domestically and $829 million globally. ‘You have to feel great when you have movies of the caliber of Star Trek, G.I. Joe and Transformers, Paramount distribution chief Jim Tharp says. ‘We were a little below the previous summer. But last year we had DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda in the summer, whereas this year their picture Monsters vs. Aliens went out in March’.”

Disney executives, “stress the profitability of their six-film seasonal slate” with isney film president Mark Zoradi stating, “Absolutely, it was a profitable summer for us”

And, “Elsewhere in the summer pecking order, Fox bounced back from a tough 2008 with a solid $591 million through last weekend, good for a 14 percent share,” says the story, gong on, “In fifth place, Sony ($524 million; 13 percent share) had a quieter summer, but the Culver City studio avoided major misfires.

But, sigh, “It was a very disappointing summer for us,” Universal marketing and distribution president Adam Fogelson is quoted as saying.

“We are all linking arms and doing everything we can to course-correct and to make sure we never have another summer like this.”

No need to stay tuned.

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

Reuters – Warner Bros. poised to take summer box-office crown, September 4, 2009

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 9:33 am and is filed under Movies, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

HOME

Viewed 3322 times