2016 Is on Track to Be Hollywood’s Worst Year for Ticket Sales in a Century

BY JULIE MILLER

This past April, movie studios and the country’s cinema suits convened in Las Vegas to wage verbal warfare on Sean Parker’s Screening Room—a proposed service that would deflate the theater industry by allowing the public to watch new releases at home. As new numbers show, however, the studios and cinema industry don’t really need Parker’s assist in flushing their business down the toilet: they seem to be doing that quite capably on their own.

The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson points out that “in 2016, the film industry is on pace to sell the fewest U.S. tickets per person of any year since perhaps before the 1920s and the fewest total tickets in two decades.“ As he explains, “This is an extrapolation based on previous years’ sales progressions, and a strong summer or fall could boost the final figures.“ (No pressure, Suicide Squad.)

Perhaps the most alarming indicator of the industry’s descent, though, is that even its prized reboots—those blockbuster sequels Hollywood has been relying on as low-risk cash grabs—have been failing at the box office. The New York Times played coroner earlier this month, pronouncing that such reboots as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Zoolander 2, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, The Divergent Series: Allegiant, and Alice Through the Looking Glass have “disappointed or flopped outright.” Hauntingly, these were the very films that, just two months ago, studios were confidently plugging inside Caesar’s Palace at CinemaCon as the kind of content that could help revive the theater business.

All sequels haven’t tanked, though—just enough to alert Hollywood that its shameless recycling strategy may be floundering. One victor in the film industry’s fight against shrinking attention spans: Conjuring 2, which managed to upset Warcraft in Stateside theaters this weekend by grossing a reported $40 million, compared to Warcraft’s measly $24 million. (Conjuring 2’s performance was one of several successful sequel showings this summer, including those by Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War.)

But Warcraft, the big-screen adaptation of the best-selling video-game series that studios poured a reported $160 million into, is just another example of a mega-Hollywood-reboot misfire. As V.F.’s critic Richard Lawson wrote in his review, “Warcraft is a strange kind of epic failure”—and this observation applies to its box-office performance as well. While bombing in the U.S., the movie earned a disproportionately high sum of $156 million in China over the film’s first five days in theaters—a stark contrast showing just how different China’s taste in movies is, and damningly, just how comparatively bored American moviegoers are by this year’s cinema.