Vintage: Facts and Figures
As promised last week, this week's Vintage post is about facts and figures that paint an overall picture of moviegoing in the late 1920s.
(Click to enlarge; in some browsers, click it a second time.)
The first image here contains statistics from early 1928. The two below it, from 1929.
The late 1920s was a real high for the popularity of the movies. Movies as a whole were still new and exciting, and sound was a brand new novelty within the novelty. People had disposable income in a way they would not in just another year. Theaters were packed.
See that attendance figure in the 1929 image? 100,000,000 people attended the movies each week. Tickets averaged 14 1/2 cents apiece. At today's admission prices, though, that would mean one billion dollars at the box office each week. Studio executives would be wetting themselves. 17% of that is more typical. Imagine that. In 1929, theaters were over five times more crowded.
More movies were made annually in the late 1920s than any other period in movie history. The figure in the right image, 820 features released in the United States in 1928, is huge. That's an average of one new movie hitting theaters every ten hours. Today, 3-5 per week is more typical. Of course, that doesn't count innumerable direct-to-DVD releases, so the comparison with today breaks down. But those numbers plummet dramatically in the early 1930s, thanks mostly to the introduction of sound. Sound makes movies harder to make. Making movies suddenly took longer and required more staff.
The collective production budget for all 820 of those 1928 features, by the way, was substantially less than the production budget of X-Men: The Last Stand alone. The entire worldwide gross revenue at the box office in 1927 is roughly equal to the worldwide gross revenue of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. (The highest grossing films of the 1920s grossed around $4.5 million; four or five different titles managed this.)
Of course, inflation easily accounts for the dramatic differences in any dollar amounts from then vs. now. But one interesting thing to note is the ratio of production costs to advertising costs. In 1927, the yearly production budget was $175 million, while the advertising costs were $67 million. Today, these figures are much closer together. For many of the big movies, the advertising budget equals the production budget. If a movie recoups its budget in its theatrical run, it's still a money loser for the studio, though it will probably hit the black in DVD sales.
This chart, from 1928, shows the number of theaters in the world. In particular, note the United States figure of 20,500. This figure has also declined since. In the 1950s, it was closer to 17,500, and today it's somewhere around 18,500. Of course, an important thing to understand is that the first multiplex didn't come along until 1963, and the first megaplex wasn't built until 1988. So we have many more actual screens today than they had in 1928, despite admitting far fewer actual patrons. Then again, the introduction of the multiplex also triggered a reduction in average seating capacity per screen.
Incidentally, the word "screen" in box office reports -- as in, "this movie opened on 3000 screens" -- actually means "theater." So a movie might appear on four physical screens at a single multiplex, but that only counts as one screen in box office reports.
As a curiosity, note the older names and spellings of certain nations, plus the now unused term "Near East."
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