Why Is 2014 Summer Box Office Stinking So Bad?
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- July 24, 2014
By Mark Hodge (doddleNEWS)
The news that the 2014 summer box office figures are the lowest in eight years doesn’t come as a big surprise.
Many reports have suggested that Hollywood’s pandering to the male demographic isn’t paying off anymore, and that studios desperately trying to appeal to teenagers has resulted in a generation of forgettable movies -- an era I like to call ‘the fart in the wind generation.’
However the biggest reason for the box office stink fest was that the blockbusters simply weren’t very good this year.
Indeed you only have to look back to summer 2012, and look ahead to summer 2015 to see that this trend is commercially cyclical rather than a downward spiral.
Of course ,we’d all like Michael Bay’s career to be involved in a horrible accident, but that’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. In fact Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction posted the biggest opening of the year so far, grossing over $100 million in North America, showing that huge numbers can be scored with the right marketing, scheduling, and brain dead subject matter.
Writer and producer Simon Kinberg, who penned one of the year’s few success stories, X-Men: Days of Future Past, believes that next summer will be a case of ‘business as usual.’
He said (via CinemaBlend): “I think it’s cyclical. Next summer will be the biggest box office summer in history, and nobody will be worrying about the business.”
Internationally, box office is doing great, with China posting terrific numbers (and may have kept the Spider-Man franchise going) But it seemed like every weekend, except Transformers 4 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the movies were boring. We should also take the 2014 World Cup into account, which clearly hurt how Hollywood was distributing their major films, and Pixar moving films from this year to 2015 and beyond didn’t help. With positive early buzz on Marvel’s?Guardians of the Galaxy, things may pick back up in August before the 2014 summer movie season ends.
One early warning sign was when analysts feared 2014 would be a dull year for movies, which hurt IMAX’s stock, along with a weak 2013 for the large-screen-format company.
Source: THR
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