By Lindsey Bahr, Film Writer
LAS VEGAS (AP) --The future of Hollywood movies is in the hands of young and diverse audiences.
At CinemaCon Tuesday, studio executives and representatives from the National Association of Theater Owners touted the importance of both groups in growing the movie business.
Higher ticket prices helped push the motion picture industry to a record box office total in North American theaters in 2016, but Walt Disney Studios distribution head Dave Hollis said attendance itself has remained nearly flat for a decade.
Meanwhile, the business is getting more complicated as streaming services compete for consumer attention.
Many of the major Hollywood studios are looking at the possibility of shortening the time between the theatrical release of a film and its availability on home video. But Hollis said Disney and its fellow studios "believe deeply that films … should be seen in a theater."
"We have a common goal to get people to see them in your cinemas," Hollis told people at the convention.
Industry executives say the focus in the coming years will be on consumers 18 to 39, whose attendance has grown in the past two years, as has that of diverse audiences.
Association President and CEO John Fithian said Hispanics constitute the most frequent moviegoers in relation to their population numbers. Attendance by Asian Americans and African Americans has also ncreased.
Millennials make up 55 percent of frequent moviegoers, according to the association, meaning they have seen four movies in the past two months.
Hollis challenged theater owners and exhibitors to keep aggressively competing for the attention of their young audiences through Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and other technology and apps used by young people.
"We live in a super-competitive world," Hollis said. "Our consumers continue to change rapidly and have more choices than ever before."
Review: Director John Crowley’s “We Live In Time”
It's not hard to spend a few hours watching Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield fall and be in love. In "We Live In Time," filmmaker John Crowley puts the audience up close and personal with this photogenic British couple through the highs and lows of a relationships in their 30s.
Everyone starts to think about the idea of time, and not having enough of it to do everything they want, at some point. But it seems to hit a lot of us very acutely in that tricky, lovely third decade. There's that cruel biological clock, of course, but also careers and homes and families getting older. Throw a cancer diagnosis in there and that timer gets ever more aggressive.
While we, and Tobias (Garfield) and Almut (Pugh), do indeed live in time, as we're constantly reminded in big and small ways — clocks and stopwatches are ever-present, literally and metaphorically — the movie hovers above it. The storytelling jumps back and forth through time like a scattershot memory as we piece together these lives that intersect in an elaborate, mystical and darkly comedic way: Almut runs into Tobias with her car. Their first chat is in a hospital hallway, with those glaring fluorescent lights and him bruised and cut all over. But he's so struck by this beautiful woman in front of him, he barely seems to care.
I suppose this could be considered a Lubitschian "meet-cute" even if it knowingly pushes the boundaries of our understanding of that romance trope. Before the hit, Tobias was in a hotel, attempting to sign divorce papers and his pens were out of ink and pencils kept breaking. In a fit of near-mania he leaves, wearing only his bathrobe, to go to a corner store and buy more. Walking back, he drops something in the street and bang: A new relationship is born. It's the... Read More