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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

> The decline in attendance at movie theaters has had a similar effect. You can’t take for granted that everyone has seen the latest Bond movie.

You can count on most everyone seeing the hits, still. The recent Avatar and Top Gun sequels, whatever the latest pump and dump from comic book or Jurrasic Park franchises, for example.

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I haven't seen any of those. We know that most people haven't seen any particular one of those three, because we (vaguely, with a huge effort) know how many tickets they've sold.

How can you count on that? I haven't seen either of those nor do I know anybody that has. There's too many movies going through to be able to see them all. Maybe for people that are super into them but not everybody is.

The bigger question is how many people go to the movie theatre (cinema). In 1930s America, about half of people used to go to the cinema on a weekly basis. By the 1950s it was 30%, by 1950 it bottomed out at 10% [0]

Today it's very rare. This is not because of the relative quality of the films, it's because there's more choice.

While most people who go do the cinema occasionally, nowhere near "Everyone" saw Avatar, Top Gun, Endgame, etc. In the UK there were 13 million cinema admissions last July, which would be just 1 in 5 people even if everyone who went only went once, and they only went to see Top Gun.

Same with watching TV. In the 90s about half a given population would watch primetime tv, today it's nearer 1/10th, there's more options to entertain. .

In the UK cinema dropped like a stone in 1955 [1], when ITV started broadcasting.

[0] https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=102...

[1] https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6693/business/cinema-atte...

I know a lot more people who never go into franchise movies than those that do and even those are loosing interest in sequel trash

Paramount and Skydance's “Top Gun: Maverick” was the highest-grossing domestic release in 2022[0], generating $719 million in ticket sales.. I think there is more than that on this equation.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/10/top-gun-maverick-disney-top-...

At $10/ticket, that's 72 million people. About 1 out of 5 people if those are the US figures and not worldwide.

And I dunno about you, but at least around here, tickets have been closer to $15-20 for a while.

I haven't seen any movies in theaters since before the start of the pandemic.

Nope, haven't seen anything you listed.

I don't even _know_ anyone who has seen these movies.

I know one, but I'm not sure that reflects our preferences since a lot of people have been, and still are, avoiding movies theaters due to covid.

I think we'll get more people seeing big blockbuster movies once covid and other viruses aren't such a concern.

Every single thing you mentioned is based on existing IP, with the youngest one, Avatar, bring already a decade old, and others multiple decades. We are running on fumes.

The median American used to see zero movies a year (in a theatre).

Has to be different now with streaming. But with a million older movies and TV shows to choose from, I'm not sure it isn't still true of pay-per-view movies like those. I for instance rarely pay even $1 for a movie.

Median American? Does this include babies and the elderly? Where did this metric originate?

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