There’s been a lot of press coverage about the purported box-office slump afflicting the motion-picture industry, and I have offered my own speculations here about why such a slump might be occurring.

But Edward Jay Epstein’s recent article in Slate points out that, as far as Hollywood’s home-grown films are concerned, there is no slump.

Even though the studios do not provide a road map for outsiders to the
precise sources of their wealth, the real numbers are available in
Hollywood. Indeed, every 90 days, each major studio sends a precise
breakdown of all its revenue from all its worldwide sources, including
movie theaters, video distributors, and television stations, to a
secretive unit of the Motion Picture Association called Worldwide
Market Research, located in Encino, Calif. The unit combines the data
into an All Media Revenue Report and sends it to a limited number of
top executives. As the studios’ trade organization, the MPA presumably
can circulate such secret data without running afoul of antitrust
laws…

Without such information, however, it is impossible to render an
accurate picture of Hollywood. Consider how earlier this year
entertainment journalists rattled on for months about a slump in the
American box office?”Box Office Slump In Its 19th Week”?as if it were a
sporting event in which the Hollywood studios couldn’t get winning
hits. The story would have been different if they had seen the data on
Page 16 in the 2005 Three Month Revenue Report. (Click here for that
page.) Instead of a box-office decline, the studios actually took in
more from the U.S. box office in the first quarter of 2005 ($870.2
million) than they did in the similar period of 2004 ($797.1 million).
So even though the total audience at movie theaters declined during
this period, this came mainly at the expense of independent, foreign,
and documentary movies. For the Hollywood studios (and their
subsidaries), in fact, there was no slump at all.

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