A summer of discontent / The piper’s being paid

Because we live in a time when the intricacies of the film business interest people more than the actual movies Hollywood makes, much media ink was spilled about a recent sustained drop in box office receipts.

Almost every publication in America fought to have its version of the story, and the sharp news magazine “This Week” even put it on the cover. The illustration showed the Titanic sinking as a boy slept in an empty theater, and the headline read: “The End? Why Movie Attendance Is on the Decline.”

In one sense this was nothing more than journalistic busywork, the desire not to be left behind on what passes for news during a slow summer. But paradoxically, this short-term overreaction masks a systemic problem with the movies that is both more serious and more difficult to remedy. It’s as if everyone was worried about a case of the sniffles in a patient threatened by a fatal disease.

This disease has been masked because, rather than tracking industry health through number of admissions, as the French and other nations do, Hollywood tracks it through box office gross. This means that creeping inflation and rising ticket prices can hide how long and how badly the movies have been slipping. When you look at the gap between the 1940s and today, both in the percentage of the population going to the movies weekly and the actual number of tickets purchased, the difference is staggering.

As the New York Times noted, referencing statistics from Edward Jay Epstein’s “The Big Picture,” in 1948 90 million Americans, or 65% of the population, went to the movies weekly. Last year it was 10%.

As unnerving as this trend is, it’s gotten worse over the last few decades. Though most adults refuse to recognize it, the movie business has changed in our lifetime. The studios like to pretend differently at Oscar time, but the reality is that Hollywood has pretty much completely written off the adult audience and placed its faith instead in teenagers and people in their 20s. And now the chickens have come home to roost.

It’s easy to understand what’s behind the shift. With film budgets rising to astronomical levels (today’s average studio picture costs close to $100 million to produce and advertise), it was only natural to gear the product to the most frequent moviegoers, the only age group that feels an imperative to leave the house, and abandon the fussier adult demographic.

With so few films intended for them, and with other demands on their time, it’s no surprise that most adults have frankly lost the moviegoing habit. An occasional earthquake such as “The Passion of the Christ,” “Fahrenheit 9/11” or “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” will shake them off the sofa, but no sane studio head can count on that.

What seems to be happening this summer is that, for the moment at least, the kids have decided they have better things to do and the adults are not around to replace them. Anyone who has watched a group of teenagers decide what to do on a given weekend night knows how haphazard their decision-making process is, and one’s heart almost goes out to grown-up production executives whose careers ride on betting huge sums on young people’s quixotic choices.

For adults to come back to theaters regularly, more studio films need to be geared to their taste, and for that to happen, budgets have to come down out of the stratosphere. Though it’s fashionable in some circles to decry studio hegemony over boutique operations such as Fox Searchlight or Universal Focus, in practice that’s meant an increase in the number of interesting films with recognizable names in the $20-million-to-$30-million range.

Now, if adults can only rouse themselves and remember to make time for excellent work such as the forthcoming adaptation of John le Carre’s “The Constant Gardener,” maybe there will be a rediscovery of the pleasures of the theatrical screen and journalists will have something new to write about.