Is this a box-office record with an asterisk?
Patrick GOLDSTEIN, Los Angeles Times
Issue date: 2/3/10 Section: Entertainment
It feels as if something is out of whack. To make a comparison with our other statistic-obsessed national pastime - baseball, of course - the movie industry's box-office charts look suspiciously like baseball's steroid-plagued all-time home run list. In most career baseball records, including pitchers' victories, hits, RBIs and even stolen bases, there are plenty of representatives in the upper reaches of the record book from the historic and modern era. But among all-time home run leaders, the top 20 list is crammed with players from the steroid era - i.e., players whose majority of careers were during the 1990s and first half of the 2000s.
Baseball purists are pretty unhappy about this development, so much so that when it comes to Hall of Fame consideration, many of the steroid-era sluggers are being shunned. (Mark McGwire has 583 home runs, normally a number that would easily qualify a hitter for the Hall of Fame induction, but the former St. Louis Cardinals slugger, who recently admitted to steroid use, has barely earned 25 percent of baseball writers' votes since he became eligible for induction, far short of what's needed for admission.)
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying "Avatar" or any of the other modern-day box-office behemoths are unworthy of their moneymaking honors. But because of ticket price inflation, which has quietly taken a giant leap forward thanks to the extra dollars moviegoers are paying to see 3-D movies, the all-time box-office charts are even more heavily weighted than ever toward 21st century films. And with more 3-D films in the pipeline, in a few years the top of the charts will be more dominated by current films.
The solution? Why not switch to box-office charts that are based on attendance, not grosses, which would give us a more realistic portrait of how many people actually saw a film, not just how much moola its studio made? I don't know about you, but when I think of how much cultural heft a film has, I'm more interested in how many people enjoyed the communal delight of being in front of the big screen, not simply how much money they had to pay to see it.
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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
Baseball purists are pretty unhappy about this development, so much so that when it comes to Hall of Fame consideration, many of the steroid-era sluggers are being shunned. (Mark McGwire has 583 home runs, normally a number that would easily qualify a hitter for the Hall of Fame induction, but the former St. Louis Cardinals slugger, who recently admitted to steroid use, has barely earned 25 percent of baseball writers' votes since he became eligible for induction, far short of what's needed for admission.)
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying "Avatar" or any of the other modern-day box-office behemoths are unworthy of their moneymaking honors. But because of ticket price inflation, which has quietly taken a giant leap forward thanks to the extra dollars moviegoers are paying to see 3-D movies, the all-time box-office charts are even more heavily weighted than ever toward 21st century films. And with more 3-D films in the pipeline, in a few years the top of the charts will be more dominated by current films.
The solution? Why not switch to box-office charts that are based on attendance, not grosses, which would give us a more realistic portrait of how many people actually saw a film, not just how much moola its studio made? I don't know about you, but when I think of how much cultural heft a film has, I'm more interested in how many people enjoyed the communal delight of being in front of the big screen, not simply how much money they had to pay to see it.
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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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