Multiple contacts with the media are inescapable aspects of daily life. Televisions flicker in kitchens, living rooms, dens, and bedrooms. Children are mesmerized by video game competitions, and families use the computer to budget, bank, and send e-mail, as well as to surf the Internet and make purchases. Music flows from radios and CD players, while cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) connect people to one another and the Internet.
Americans devote much time to the media, which includes television, radio, recorded music, newspapers, books, magazines, videos/DVDs for rent or purchase, movies in theaters, video games, and online computer services. In general, the less costly a form of consumer media is, the greater the usage of that medium. Since broadcast TV and radio are free to consumers, they have become the most widely used media, followed by subscription video services, recorded music, and online services. The most expensive media on an hourly basis are movies in theaters and videos/DVDs for rent or purchase.
According to the July 2003 survey Internet and Multimedia 11: New Media Enters the Mainstream, conducted by Arbitron Edison Research, the average American was then spending three hours and twenty minutes a day watching television, two hours, thirty-nine minutes listening to the radio, thirty-eight minutes reading the newspaper, and one hour, three minutes online. In Communications Industry Forecast and Report 2004, a study released in August 2004, the merchant banking firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson projected that by 2008 total media time per consumer would surpass eleven hours a day, reaching approximately seventy-eight hours per week.
The Birth of an Industry
In 1891 Thomas Alva Edison, the American inventor best known for the electric light bulb and phonograph, or "talking machine," applied for a patent on a "kinetoscopic camera." This camera took motion pictures on a band of film that could be seen by looking or "peeping" into a box, which gave these early pictures the name "peep shows." This invention soon gave rise to movie projectors and screens. In 1893 Edison and his partner, W. K. L. Dickson, built the Black Maria, the first movie studio.
As the United States entered the twentieth century, inventions such as the automobile, radio, telephone, and airplane were beginning to change the way people lived. While not everyone could afford all of these modern wonders, almost anyone could pay the price of a ticket to see "moving pictures" wherever there was a theater and a piano. (The first motion pictures were "silent movies." They had no sound and the actors' words were printed on the screen so the audience could follow the plot. A piano player or musical ensemble typically provided background music to make the movie more exciting.)
The first "blockbuster" movie, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (also known as The Clansman), was released in 1915 and concerned the American Civil War and the beginnings of the racist group the Ku Klux Klan. The film's sympathetic treatment of its subject matter outraged African-Americans and some whites, but it went on to make more money than any other film released to that time. World War I gave filmmakers spectacles that audiences wanted to see, and 1,175 war films were made during that time, according to the American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States.
The years following the war saw a period of financial growth for the United States, and this prosperity, along with the emergence of such stars as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino, helped the motion picture industry become highly successful. By the mid-1920s, some twenty thousand movie theaters were showing moving pictures in the United States, twice the number as in 1910.
On the technical side, the industry was moving forward, with the first feature-length "talking picture," 1927's The Jazz Singer, revolutionizing the art of filmmaking while ending some careers and giving birth to others. The late 1930s saw the perfection of Technicolor, which was used to spectacular effect in such features as Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, although many films continued to be made in less-expensive black and white until the mid-1960s.
Movie Business Boom
Motion pictures remained one of America's favorite pastimes throughout the 1930s and 1940s. By 1950, however, television had emerged as a competitor. When it began to surge in popularity, fewer people went to the movies. Weekly attendance dropped from about ninety million people in 1947 to an average of forty-two million in the 1950s and 1960s. Gross sales fell from an all-time record high of $1.5 billion in 1957 to a yearly average of $1.2 billion in the 1950s and rose only slightly in the 1960s.
To respond to the threat of television, movie producers in the 1950s introduced a number of gimmicks such as widescreen and three-dimensional (3-D) movies to lure people back to theaters. Special glasses had to be worn for 3-D films to make it seem as though figures "jumped off" the screen, while widescreen movies simply resized the image for display on a larger, panoramic screen. Though the 3-D craze died off after just a year, the industry retained the widescreen format for all future theatrical releases.
The 1950s also saw an estimated 4,700 drive-in theaters built. These outdoor venues allowed families to park their cars by poles equipped with portable speakers and view the movies on giant screens. Drive-ins solved babysitting problems for parents and were so popular that they accounted for 25% of movie attendance in the 1950s. Teenagers also loved them for other reasons, which led to drive-ins earning the nickname "passion pits."
The number of drive-ins began to fall as suburbs spread out and property became more expensive. By 1971 the total had dropped to 3,720, and the ensuing decades saw an even more rapid decline. In 2003 just 408 remained in the entire country.
The way Americans viewed movies on indoor screens also changed during these years. In 1945 some 20,355 movie theaters existed; by 1960 that number had dwindled to 11,300. In 2003 it stood at 6,066, but because of the rise of the multiplex (multiscreen) theater beginning in the 1970s, the number of actual screens had grown to 35,786, an average of more than six per theater, according to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Technological changes were occurring as well. In the late 1970s Dolby Stereo was introduced, and with its effective use in such films as the first Star Wars movie, it soon became the standard of the industry. By the late 1990s digital sound had become commonplace, and by the early twenty-first century the era of film itself appeared to be nearing an end. With filmmakers like George Lucas of Star Wars fame shooting their features digitally, and with rapid advances in digital projection technology, the number of all-digital screens rose to 171 worldwide in 2003 from 124 in 2002, according to the MPAA. The savings on expensive 35mm movie prints, and the prospect of splice-and scratch-free screenings for the life of a film, were driving factors in the anticipated conversion of the entire industry to an all-digital standard over time.
Box Office Grosses
According to the MPAA, total U.S. box office grosses climbed from the mid-1990s, with 2003 receipts of $9.5 billion, only 0.3% lower than the industry record year of 2002 and 13.2% above the $8.4 billion taken in during 2001. (See Table 4.8.) The increased revenues were largely attributable to growing numbers of admissions, although rising ticket prices also contributed. (See Table 2.9 in Chapter 2.)
The top movie of 2003, Finding Nemo, earned a total of $339.7 million at the U.S. box office, according to the MPAA, followed by Pirates of the Caribbean ($305.4 million), Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (290.4 million), The Matrix Reloaded ($281.5 million), and Bruce Almighty ($242.6 million).
Moviegoers
According to the MPAA, 167.6 million Americans went to a movie in 2003. Of these, slightly more than one-third went to movies more than once a month, while half went between two and eleven times a year and 15% went less than once every six months. Half of moviegoers were between the ages of twelve and twenty-nine, and although their growth rate remained flat when compared with 2002, the number of moviegoers aged forty to fifty-nine was growing, with attendance in this age group increasing 7% during the year.
In addition to revenues from box office receipts, which were split with theater owners, a movie such as the third entry in the Lord of the Rings trilogy also drove sales of the books it was based on, toys, games, clothing, video-cassettes, and DVDs. According to Peter Mirsky, an Oppenheimer media analyst, 40% of the earnings for the Ring films would come from the box office, while another 35% would be from home video sales, 5% to 10% would come from television showings, and 15% would be derived from licensed merchandise sales.
Digital Videodiscs (DVDs) and Videocassettes
Some industry experts once believed that videocassette recorders (VCRs) and digital videodisc (DVD) players, which made it easy to watch movies at home, would hurt movie box office sales more than television. Others thought that such viewing alternatives would make more money for a film over time. Moviemakers learned that if a movie made money at the box office, it would also make money in video/DVD sales and rentals. In fact, sometimes a movie that was not expected to do well in movie theaters was released directly to video, where it could generate considerable revenue from rentals and purchases.
Although home video was once dominated by the tape-based VCR, by 2004 the higher-quality image and sound of DVDs, and the drop in price of players to an average of $122 (according to the Consumer Electronics Association, or CEA), had made it the hottest format in the video industry. Research conducted by the CEA found that in January 2001, 94% of U.S. households had VCRs and 15% had DVD players, but by January 2004, the number of households with VCRs had fallen to 87%, while 50% had DVD players. (See Table 2.4 in Chapter 2.)
According to Adams Media Research, the number of DVDs sold to dealers in the United States in 2003 was 1.1 billion, up 50.2% from 2002. The number of videocassettes sold was just 293.6 million, down 39% from 2002. By 2003, twenty-nine thousand different titles were available on DVD.
A 2001 Gallup poll found that watching movies at home was a popular way for Americans to spend an evening. Eighty-three percent of all polled respondents and 88% of those who owned a VCR or DVD player said they had viewed a movie at home during the month preceding the poll. Nearly all (96%) young adults ages eighteen to twenty-nine reported viewing an average of almost thirteen movies per month at home. More than 90% of adults ages thirty to forty-nine watched movies at home, but on average they watched about half as many as the younger adults. Rates of home movie viewing as well as the average number of films viewed per month declined with advancing age.
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