For the last few weeks of the year, I’m going through stories I saved, but never posted. Today’s stories are from July 2009:

* One of my favorite websites if BoxOfficeMojo.com, a massive database of information about movies. And in July, when it looked like 2010 would set a box office record, I checked out BOM’s yearly box office chart.

In 1980, the first year of the chart, check out these numbers:

Box Office Revenue: $2,749M
Tickets Sold: 1,022M
Movies Produced: 161
Total Screens: 17,590
Avg Ticket Price: $2.69
Avg Production Cost Per movie: $9.4M

One interesting note: Once TV penetrated into a majority of American homes in the 1950s, the number of tickets sold stayed fairly steady for 25 years – right around 1M. In fact, one of the working assumptions up through the mid-80s was that that number was pretty well etched in stone – the movie studios could expect to sell about 1,000,000 tickets per year. Now compare those numbers to 2009 (not yet finalized):

Box Office Revenue: $10,169M
Tickets Sold: 1,416M
Movies Produced: 512
Total Screens: 35,00+ (last figure from 2002)
Avg Ticket Price: $7.18
Avg Production Cost Per movie: $63M+ (last figure from 2003)

So box office revenues increased tripled.
Tickets sold expanded by nearly 40%.
Movies produced grew by over 3 times.
Total screens just about doubled.
Average price of a ticket went up about 2 1/2 times.
But the average cost of a movie went up 7 times.

Which means that while the market has expanded – and let’s not forget the emergence of ancillary forms of revenue like videocassette, DVD, straight-to-video / straight-to-DVD, international – both the number of movies produced and their individual cost is what really went through the roof. That Hwood is attempting to respond to those facts is reflected in the shrinkage of the number of movies produced (605 in 2008, 512 in 2009) and a reported cut in production costs to below $60M this year.

* Per Daily Variety, now behind a paywall, this was encouraging news:

FilmBuff, a video-on-demand channel curated by New York indie sales outfit Cinetic, will launch Wednesday.

Channel will initially be available in 10 million VOD-enabled cable households in North America, ramping up to 30 million by the end of the summer.

FilmBuff will offer 10-15 firstrun films and classics per month. Among the first key titles for which deals have been inked are “The Carter,” a docu about rapper Lil Wayne that bowed at Sundance earlier this year; plus the original “The Inglorious Bastards,” helmed by Enzo Castellari. “The Carter” will bow in August, and “Inglorious” is on tap when Quentin Tarantino‘s “Inglourious Basterds” rolls out on DVD

* Storylink had this piece from Haden Blackman on writing videogames. His three big pieces of advice:

Every game needs two inter-connected themes.

The Player is the Hero, but the Hero still needs flaws.

Don’t confuse story and story-telling.

Per the last one:

Game developers are becoming increasingly good at crafting cinematic moments within games, triggering events and story moments based on the player’s actions. A plane crashing right in front of you, a monster jumping out at just the right moment, a character who screams uncontrollably after you shoot someone close to her… These are all essential for creating a sense of immersion, bringing a setting to life, and conveying a story, but they are not the story itself. Without a strong plot, compelling central conflict, and characters we can care about, there are few reasons for a player to continue through this collection of set-pieces and surprises. How a player defeats an enemy is important, but so is the why, and it’s the why that can keep some players motivated to see a game through to the end.

Meanwhile Robert McKee goes around saying things like this:

RM: In the past I have gone up to Microsoft and Sierra Online and given my story lecture to people who are create video games. They have ambition to create far more complex, content-rich video games, but they always hit the wall. It is not possible because they are not art, they are games. When you have interaction between the work and the audience, you ask the audience to make decisions of their own. When it becomes interactive it stops being art; it is a game. Games, by their nature, cannot be rich, subjective, and have all the other qualities of art. The problem with games is that they have to find wonderful new variations of the same very rigid story model. I am afraid that they are stuck there.

Let’s see if we can find one male below the age of 25 who believes that.

* And film critic Roger Ebert responded to people who lambasted him for lambasting Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen:

Roger Ebert is a moron! Transformers 2 is the best action movie ever. Don’t listem to that moron! He is only into slow boring romantic movies. That is his type of movies. Michael Bay did a great good. Roger… your an old fart! John C

Having now absorbed all or parts of 750 responses to my complaints about “Transformers,” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that most of those writing agree with me that it is a horrible movie. After all, look where they’ve chosen to comment. There have, however been some disagreements that I thought were reasonable. These writers mostly said they had a thing about the Transformers toys of their childhoods, or liked the animation on TV, or like to see stuff blowed up real good. In that case. Michael Bay is your man. If you enjoyed the movie, there is no way I can say you’re wrong. About yourself, anyway.

Which is almost exactly what I said in my review of the movie back in June here.