By many accounts, 2013 was, at the very least, a solid year at the domestic box office. Total gross1 was at an all-time high, and while the average ticket prices were up, the year still fell “somewhere in the middle of tickets sold when looking over the past six years.”2 As of the end of 2013, 31 different films grossed over $100 million - a mark once reserved for truly widespread hits, not Epic and Now You See Me. 3

Once you dive in a bit deeper, though, 2013 represented a nadir historically.

( Note : Thanks to Box Office Mojo for the data used below - in my experience, their data set is by far the most complete, accurate, and widely available. Data prior to 1982 is less consistent, and so not used).

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This one’s fairly simple - domestic box office has been consistently up since

  1. Not a huge surprise, nor does it have much sway - ticket prices have risen drastically.

Like the path of the box office, ticket prices have, on average, risen steadily. I’ll note here that these being aggregate statistics - yearly, for the entire domestic market, and on average - it likely smooths out a lot of variation. For instance - is the average ticket price in New York City rising much more quickly than in suburban Pennsylvania; or, is more of the total box office increasingly due to non-summer months? Unfortunately, I can’t get into that here - I’d need a lot more data.

A little less convincing of the strength of 2013 - like I noted above, number of tickets sold are down. But number of tickets sold in 2013 was between 5-30% higher than any year from 1982-1995 - a clear indication of improvement. Well, maybe.

This one’s a little more interesting. The number of movies released each year has steadily risen - from 428 in 1982 to 683 in 2013. Incidentally, 2013 had the largest number of movies released in any year since 1982.

Given the number of movies each year and the total domestic box office gross, the average movie made about $16 million in 2013. Not the highest historically, but well above most historical years - much like the number of tickets sold. No sign of real weakness.

Here’s where 2013 looks much, much worse. Taking a few of the above statistics together - they are inherently tied together - while the average movie made $16 million, the average movie only sold 1.97 million tickets. This is, in fact, the lowest in any year since 1982 (and it has been declining since 2002)

  • a disheartening sign of weakness in the domestic box office.

This one’s a bit more complicated, but it tells the whole story. Given the year-over-year change for each of the above - this is that change, compounded, since 1982. Put very simply - total gross in 2013 sits at 316% - this means it is 316% of the 1982 total gross. More importantly, the average tickets sold per movie in 2013 is at an all-time low of 72% of 1982’s average tickets sold. And the trend continues down.

You can see how all five of these stats - total gross, number of movies, average ticket price, average gross per movie, and average tickets sold per movie - have changed relative to each other. And here’s where it’s most clear that the $10.9 billion grossed domestically in 2013 - again, the largest ever

  • is due almost entirely to the increase in ticket prices and the increase in the number of movies. What this means is that the market continues to become more and more saturated with movies, while each of those movies sells fewer and fewer tickets. One could argue the causes - it has been increasingly easy to make a movie, distribution methods have shifted away from a wide release in theaters, there are a significant number of alternative options to going to the movies (including, but not limited to, Netflix and other streaming options and a better and wider selection of TV), there may be an increasing lack of interest in going to the movies altogether - but the effect is the same. While there may be more movies than ever before, fewer and fewer people are going to see each one.

1 Money made in domestic markets - US and Canada.
2 http://www.hitfix.com/awards-campaign/lessons-from-the-2013-box-office- top-20-movies-of-the-year
3 Important note: I’m using Epic and Now You See Me as punchlines, but I didn’t see either of them. I apologize to the creators of these two films for judging solely based on the bus ads I saw in May and June. Maybe they’re both great!