By David Germain, Movie Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Hollywood is finishing its summer with record revenue but the lowest actual movie attendance in five years.
Domestic receipts from the first weekend in May through the upcoming Labor Day weekend should come in at about $4.35 billion — $100 million more than the record set last year, according to Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.
Attendance is down because of a steep rise in ticket prices, heavily due to a surge in 3-D screenings, which cost a few dollars more than regular movie admissions.
Through Labor Day, the actual number of tickets sold during the summer season is expected to come in at 552 million, the lowest since 563.2 million tickets were sold in summer 2005, Dergarabedian estimated Monday.
Ticket prices this year are averaging $7.88, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. That’s up 38 cents, or 5 percent, from 2009.
“To have record revenue built on the back of much higher ticket prices, in a way, it’s kind of a shallow victory. You want to see attendance go up every year, not down,” Dergarabedian said.
The summer delivered some huge crowd-pleasers, led by Disney’s “Toy Story 3,” which followed “Shrek 2” as just the second animated film to top $400 million at the domestic box office.
Paramount’s “Iron Man 2” shot past $300 million, while Summit Entertainment’s “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” has almost hit that mark. Topping $200 million were the Warner Bros. release “Inception,” Paramount and DreamWorks Animation’s “Shrek Forever After” and Universal’s “Despicable Me.”
Sony had three $100 million hits with “The Karate Kid,” ”Grown Ups” and “Salt.”
Other releases failed to live up to the hype of summer blockbuster season, among them the Warner Bros. sequel “Sex and the City 2,” Disney’s “The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and 20th Century Fox’s “Marmaduke” and “Knight and Day.”
“Audiences were underwhelmed, and they voted with their absence,” Dergarabedian said. “If you asked most people what they thought of the quality of the movies, it’s kind of a so-so summer. We could have done a lot worse were it not for films like ‘Inception’ and ‘Toy Story 3.'”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More