The motion picture industry is showing signs of a turnaround!
Hollywood got the top present on its Christmas list today: a lucrative 2012.
Despite a chilly summer at the box office, 2012 will mark the industry’s highest year on record and the first since 2009 when ticket sales increased, according to projections from analysts. The industry is expected to see about $10.8 billion in ticket sales, according to analyses from Hollywood.com.
The haul would mark a 6% increase over ticket sales in 2011, when Hollywood took in about $10.2 billion.
Increased ticket revenue is bolstered by people returning to the multiplex: Attendance is up about 5% over last year. Though 2012 probably won’t challenge 2002’s modern-day admission record of 1.7 billion tickets sold, 2012 already has had 1.3 billion people pass through domestic turnstiles.
The industry has been affected by a sagging economy and overload of 3-D pictures flatlined sales until this year, which saw the third-highest-grossing film of all time in The Avengers, taking in $623 million.
Other films, including The Hunger Games ($408 million), The Dark Knight Rises ($448 million) and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2 ($282 million) kept revenue afloat, despite slow August and September returns.
In addition, Hollywood studios continue to see a slow turnaround in home video sales after a seven-year decline, as consumers increase the numbers of movies and TV shows they stream online and buy more high-definition Blu-ray discs as DVDs fall from favor.
Growth in this ancillary market is crucial to Hollywood studios, whose films often generate more revenues from that market than from the domestic box office. For the first time, digital delivery of movies, a business that has great margins, surpassed movie rentals in the second quarter, with consumers spending $1.2 billion on movies from Netflix subscriptions, ITunes downloads and other digital distribution methods, an 81 percent increase.
The industry still has a ways to go to get back to the old days when movies ruled all entertainment but at least indicators show that we’re moving in the right direction.