DB here:

How many screens are showing movies theatrically across the world? What is the global box-office take? How many people go to the movies? What do movie tickets cost in various countries of the world? In what nations do people go the movies most often? Least often?

Comprehensive and reliable information on these matters is hard to come by. Fortunately, there are media research companies that track such information….for a price.

We pay the price, because the information is central to our research. But there’s no reason to keep you in the dark, so herewith some factoids from 2005.

Global box office receipts: $23.6 billion.
This is down from 2004 ($24 billion), but still the second highest ever recorded. Europe and US slumped a bit, but in Asia and the Far East, receipts were up. Markets outside North America yielded about 59% of world box office.

Global admissions: 7.5 billion.
India provides 3.8 billion of that alone! China is relatively thin in theatrical admissions, with only 157 million. Western Europe yields about 850 million, as compared with the USA, with admissions of 1.4 billion.
The big news is that admissions have declined significantly in most countries, often ranging from 5-20 %. Even the USA has seen nearly a 10% drop in admissions. The overall box-office slump isn’t as severe because the dwindling attendance has been offset by a rise in ticket prices and a boost in some countries’ admissions, most notably South Korea (up about 7 %) and China (up nearly 15%).

Global screen count: 149,083.
Nearly 40,000 of these are in China (but many are temporary or occasional venues). The USA has nearly as many screens, at 39,000. But China has 1.3 billion people, while the US has only 300 million. At the other extreme, poor little Tunisia, with 10 million people, has only 22 movie screens.

Screens per million population: Iceland is the leader (about 160 screens per million), followed by Sweden and the US, each with about 130 screens per million head.
The lowest proportions are in Vietnam, Tunisia (no surprise), and Ukraine, with about 1-2 screens per million population.

Average global ticket price (in US dollars): $3.14.
Most expensive ticket: Switzerland ($11.55). Lowest: India, at $.32. US: $6.41.

Visiting the cinema
Most visits per capita: Iceland (4.77 times per year), USA (4.73), Singapore (4.16).
Others: France and Spain (2.9), Belgium (2.1), Japan (1.26), Russia (.55).
Fewest visits per capita: Cuba (.17), Romania (.13), China (.12).

The data aren’t complete for some countries, chiefly those in Africa. Still, the figures are intriguing. Here are a couple of inferences.

North America, chiefly the US and Canada, yields a disproportionate chunk of box office receipts: a whopping 41 %. Why? These countries are at once populous and prosperous. Elsewhere, the most populous countries (e.g., India, China) aren’t as wealthy, and so ticket prices are low. The most prosperous countries, where people can afford high ticket prices, tend to be small ones, like Western European and Scandinavian nations. The US and Canada have the best of both worlds.

Another inference: Some countries are densely screened, with the US being a prime instance. It’s a strategy driven by the idea that each weekend includes must-see movies. So there need to be a lot of screens to accommodate demand for the same films over the same three days. But that’s just the weekend; outside the biggest cities, theatres are virtually empty the rest of the week.

It’s too soon to say if the drop in attendance is temporary or part of a long, slow decline. These patterns tend to fluctuate over several years. In 1995, worldwide attendance was 6.8 billion, so recent years have seen a healthy growth.

There’s a lot else to speculate on here, but let’s not neglect one conclusion. Icelanders really, really like movies.

PS: Send me a photo of an Iceland movie theatre, preferably full of Icelanders, and we’ll add it to this entry.

Thanks to the good people at Screen Digest, and particularly David Hancock’s department. The information above is culled from SD‘s annual profile “Global Cinema Exhibition Trends,” published in October 2006.

From DB:

Every so often we’re told that the real “author” of a film is the screenwriter. What do we make of this?

I think I first heard this idea in 1966. It was already old then. Publishers had for some time brought out books of screenplays, treating them as literature (e.g., the James Agee scripts) or as the ur-form of the film in the days before home video (John Gassner’s Twenty Best Film Plays). Responding to Andrew Sarris’ auteur theory, Richard Corliss wrote The Hollywood Screenwriters in 1972. The book was organized in a fashion parallel to Sarris’ trailblazing The American Cinema, ranking screenwriters and suggesting their recurring thematic concerns. But it had nothing like the impact of Sarris’s account of directorial differences. Once Corliss became a critic for Time, he did what everybody else did: attributed the goodness or badness of a film primarily to the director and barely mentioned the screenwriter.

Ever since then, the notion has resurfaced periodically, usually with an air of thunderous discovery. David Kipen subtitled his book The Schreiber Theory boldly, too boldly: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History. The idea is recycled in Joe Eszterhas’s new book The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God! (St. Martin’s Press). Beyond the scurrilous gossip and thumbnail advice he offers, Eszterhas claims that the screenwriter is the key creative individual in movie making. He denounces the auteur theory, which assigns artistic control primarily to the director, and he constantly asserts that no great movie was ever made without a great screenplay.

Eszterhas does grant that when a director writes the script him- or herself, that justifies the auteur theory. But when the director works from a script by another hand, the prime mover isn’t in doubt.

You’re the storyteller, not the director. . . . If anybody in your presence refers to the director as a “storyteller,” deck him (or her).

In musical terms, you are the composer; the director conducts the orchestra.

This idea poses a lot of problems.

Many films need no script. Consider Ballet Mécanique, Oskar Fischinger’s work, Tony Conrad’s Flicker, Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, Andy Warhol’s Haircut, Lewis Klahr’s Two Minutes to Zero Trilogy, and many, many others in the avant-garde or experimental filmmaking tradition. Eszterhas’s claim would apply only to fictional mass market cinema—that is, the movies at the multiplex. But even then there are difficulties.

First, in principle we could have a mainstream movie that was completely unscripted. Maybe the directors and actors and crew cooked up, day by day, a series of scenes in which the dialogue was improvised. Maybe they shot at a 100:1 ratio and carved out of the footage a recognizable, ordinary film. We’d then have something that we’d accept as a passable movie without there ever having been a script.

Granted, this is very unlikely to happen, and it’s probably even more unlikely to result in a good movie. Perhaps the closest existing example is the working method of Wong Kar-wai, who writes his scenes day by day and shoots them more or less off the cuff. Gradually, he compiles enough material to assemble a film. The practice can cause anxieties for his collaborators, and there’s certainly a lot of wasted time and footage, but the results certainly pass muster. Even if you don’t buy the example, it remains possible in principle to make an acceptable mass-market film without a script.

There are more complicated theoretical issues too.

If we all agree that a movie consists of images and sounds, not words on a page, then Eszterhas’ analogy with music fails. In the Western concert tradition, the score captures key features of the identity of a piece. A musical score is written in a more stringent notational system than the language of screenplays. There isn’t a one-to-one relationship between what’s written in the script and what shows up on the screen. The sounds and moving images aren’t specified by the screenplay to the degree that performances of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony are specified by the score.

The screenwriter writes: “An office.” But the director and the cinematographer and many others must specify how that office looks, the style of the furniture, the way light strikes the surfaces, the position from which the camera sees the action, and hundreds of other factors that shape the image. No one could write all these details into a screenplay. Even if he or she tried, any item could always be construed in a different way when the image is created. Is the desk the shade of brown that the screenwriter envisioned? Are the lampshades the same size?

No prose description of any chunk of reality can uniquely specify the layout of objects and all the patterns of light, color, and shape. By the same logic, no screenplay can exhaustively pre-plan the movie image.

What about dialogue? Much the same holds true as for the image. Even if an actor says the writer’s line word for word as written, it can be delivered in many different ways. And of course facial expression, stance, gesture, and all the other physical components of performance are visual, and can’t be singularly specified any more than our office setting.

Here’s a thought experiment. Give four directors the same script. I think that we intuitively believe that the result would be four substantially different movies, even if all scenes were retained, no new ones were added, and not a line of dialogue was altered. Consider as a rough but intriguing example Michael Mann’s TV movie LA Takedown (1989) redone as Heat (1995). There are enough similarities to allow us to see how different two realizations of a scripted scene can be, even in the hands of the same director.

So the words on the page may be transmuted into images and sounds in an indefinite number of ways. Mass-market film production is a process of constant revision: the shooting transforms the script, and then editing and sound work transform the footage.

Someone could reply that the film script is more like the script for a theatre piece. A play can be realized in many different versions, or productions, but we consider the playwright the true author. And we do call a script a screenplay, a play for the screen. So forget the analogy to music. Maybe the film director is like the stage director, and the screenwriter is the true author. We talk of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in, say, Jonathan Miller’s production, so why don’t we speak of Joe Eszterhas’s Showgirls in Paul Verhoeven’s production?

Again, though, we don’t need a script to put on a theatre piece. There are improvised plays, standup comedy routines that grew organically without ever being committed to paper, and commedia dell’arte performances that rely on tradition, not playscripts. Further, for many traditions, the unique identity of a play rests in its text, which must be followed more or less strictly. You can stage Macbeth on the flying trapeze or underwater, and it’s still Macbeth. But if you rewrite the dialogue or add scenes and characters, you’re not doing Shakespeare’s Macbeth any more. Staging a play doesn’t revise the script, as filmmaking does, but rather embodies it.

A movie script can’t uniquely identify what image or noise or passage of music should be presented on the screen. A play script can’t determine every detail of production either, but in many theatrical traditions the script has become the sine qua non of the production. What is inviolate is the text, the speeches; the director has some leeway in handling the stage directions.

A screenplay isn’t a blueprint or road map, let alone something like a musical score. It’s not even as integral as a play text. At best it’s an approximation, a set of suggestions. To borrow from Pirates of the Caribbean: It’s more in the nature of guidelines, really.

Making a film in the mass-market cinema is a series of constant revisions and rethinkings. One script may be revised by another screenwriter, and the result of that may be revised by a team of other writers. By the time The Script reaches the shooting phase of production, it’s often already a collective product. The revision process continues right to the end. Anything in the shooting script may be tossed out if something more fitting is discovered in the course of shooting, editing, and sound design.

In many cases the person supervising such discoveries is the director. This isn’t to deny writers an important role in the creation of a film. All participants contribute something, and scriptwriters contribute a lot. But it seems that in movies made the Hollywood way, the role of the director is in principle the crucial one in coordinating all the inputs and creating something coherent.

In practice, of course, the role may be filled by many individuals. For any particular case, the director may not have the ability or authority to fill the role, and other individuals can assume it. In such cases, we could say that the producer took over when the director left the project, or the star grabbed control of the scene from the director, and so on.

In fact, we do tend to say such things. Which suggests that deep down, there’s a little bit of auteurist in all of us.

This morning I received my author’s copies of a superb book published by the Danish Film Institute, 100 Years of Nordisk Film. Nordisk was one of the world’s top producing and distributing companies in the 1900s and 1910s, and it continues today. This volume, edited by Lispeth Richter Larsen and Dan Nissen, is now the fullest account in English of this extraordinary firm.

There are essays by top scholars like Isak Thorsen, Marguerite Engberg, Stephan Michael Schroder, Niels Jorgen Dinnesen, Edvin Kau, Thomas Christensen, Casper Tybjerg, Ib Bondebjerg, and Peter Schelpern, and the illustrations are eye-popping. I contribute an essay on the aesthetics of Nordisk’s 1910s films, and my stills came out beautifully.

Many of the silent films discussed are available on DVD from the Institute, and they are extraordinary. If you want a sample, try the Asta Nielsen or Benjamin Christensen collection. These are amazing movies, and the Christensens offer remarkably inventive uses of cutting, lighting, and camera movement–very unusual for their day.
I don’t yet find a source for ordering the book online, but it will probably be available soon from the Institute’s bookstore. Danish cinema is one of the most exciting national cinemas in Europe right now; for coverage, have a look at their new homepage.

Addendum to an earlier post: Industry sage and entertaining skeptic David Poland of The Hot Button calls foul on Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on the Epagogix software–you know, the one purporting to predict hit movies. Thanks to Sean Weitner of Flak Magazine (itself highly recommended).

DB again:

A story in today’s New York Times highlights a point I’ve made elsewhere on this site (“Down in the Valleys”) and in The Way Hollywood Tells It. My claim is that scholars, journalists, and moviegoers have come to identify contemporary Hollywood with stratospherically budgeted blockbuster movies. Several films scholars have gone on to suggest that the megapicture has redefined moviemaking. If the studio era, pre-1960, was a “classical” filmmaking era, perhaps we’re now in a post-classical one, when principles of story and style have collapsed.

Now I don’t think that tentpole pictures stray much beyond the classical norms. But even if they did, the program pictures, released week in and week out, do so quite seldom. In addition, I argued that the programmers are more reliable as investments exactly because they’re easy to assimilate. A breakout midrange picture like The Devil Wears Prada is a good example. Did anybody out there find it fragmented, postmodern, or incoherent?

Today’s NYT story is about the rise of hedge funds and other investment instruments that are becoming more involved in film financing. The relevant quote is: “A result for moviegoers is that they could begin to see even more thrillers, comedies, and horror movies at the multiplex–the types of movies Wall Street favors because of their more predictable payoff.” The relevant player is Joel Silver, who has just signed on to make “a mix of horror, comedy, and action movies that will cost $15 million to $40 million apiece.” These are just the sort of midrange pictures that can yield the reliable profit percentages Kristin has talked about earlier this week, and that are likely to be quite directly linked to the classical Hollywood storytelling tradition.