About That Poll
A new HarrisX Poll draws all the wrong conclusions about theaters and streaming.
Because everything these days is clickbait, the Internet is suddenly having a fit over a HarrisX poll, exclusive to Indiewire, which is alleged to have determined that “a solid two-thirds” of people polled would rather wait and see movies on a streaming platform than in movie theaters. Because neither IndieWire nor HarrisX divulged the actual methodology or furnished a complete breakdown of raw polling data, we have little to go on other than a handful of details revealed by Indiewire:
The survey was conducted online from March 11-12, 2024.
The survey captured responses from more than 1,000 U.S. adults.
Results were weighted by gender, age, race/ethnicity, region, and income where necessary to reflect the population.
Margin of error was 3 percentage points.
At first glance, that sounds like every other poll since the election of Taft — except that if you know anything about polling, those details throw up more red flags than a Chinese military parade. While HarrisX is a broadly respected market research firm, they are nonetheless subject to the very same inclinations and biases as every other research firm — which is that they approach the entertainment industry with a deficit of historical and cultural context. In other words, it’s not so much what they did in administering the poll as what they did not do, which is factor in Hollywood history and the vagaries of moviegoing culture over time. In fairness, research firms generally concede that such considerations aren’t really within their purview — their job is to furnish point-in-time snapshots of consumer behavior. Whatever conclusions others choose to draw from those snapshots is out of their control. Still, weighting by “gender, age, race/ethnicity, region and income” to reflect the population, but making no effort to render any meaningful comparison to previous eras makes it impossible to draw useful conclusions, especially when we lack the raw data.
What we can say is that online polling has been frequently criticized because of the risks associated with “opt-in sampling.” It’s a good bet some of those problems have crept in here, because we don’t really need HarrisX to extrapolate what people do. We already know.
But let’s back up a moment — because there’s a bigger story here.
Theatergoers are back…
The demise of movie theaters has been predicted at least a half-dozen times since the dawn of cinema. Television, pay cable, VHS and DVD were all supposed to chip away at the centrality of the movie theater experience — and all ended up both boosting it and benefiting from it as widescreen, technicolor, digital audio and digital projection kept pace. So excuse me if the notion that streaming will somehow finally be the giant killer strikes me as a lot of warmed over déja vu. There’s no question that theaters are having a rough time of late — which has a lot less to do with streaming than the triple whammy of 1) the pandemic — in which civil authorities forced theaters to close, 2) last year’s dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, and 3) the AMPTP’s forthcoming round of contract talks with IATSE and the consortium of craft locals known as the Basic Crafts. Throw in the ongoing epidemic of layoffs, widespread uncertainty over the future of Disney, the future of Paramount, Warner Bros. discomfiting new practice of throwing hotly-anticipated movies in the trash to gain the benefit of a tax loophole, and the accumulated overkill of TOO MUCH (e.g. streaming series, superhero movies) and we’re left with a crippled production outlook in which even healthy, no-drama studios like Universal and Sony aren’t expected to ramp back up to pre-pandemic theatrical production levels until late 2024 or early 2025. What this all means is that the hit the movie business took in 2020 won’t fully recover until 2026 at the earliest.
Box office numbers, however, do not bear out the notion that people are in any way abandoning movie theaters. Domestic annual box office first exceeded $10 billion in 2009 and fluctuated between $10 billion and $11 billion right up through 2019. A near total closure of theaters throughout 2020 saw domestic box office plummet to just $2 billion — the lowest domestic tally since 1981. The following year, however, even with COVID-19 an ongoing concern and urban theater-goers still reticent to return to their old ways, box office doubled to more than $4 billion. By the end of 2022, that figure was nearly back to $7.5 billion (thank you, Top Gun: Maverick), swelling to just shy of $9 billion twelve months later (thank you, Barbenheimer). As of today — late March, 2024 — the forecast for the year is that box office will dip a bit and come in closer to $8 billion, a drop which was predicted at the time of last year’s strikes. Data from FranchiseRe, however, shows that while strikes have reduced inventory of wide release studio fare — studios have primarily cut back on non-franchise films while continuing to boost franchise films at the same time that audiences are showing franchise fatigue. And yet, audience attendance relative to the volume of wide-release theatrical films — even with diminished inventory — has bounced back from pandemic lows to mean attendance figures on par with those pre-pandemic.
The data tracked at The-Numbers shows the number of tickets sold domestically has bobbled between 1.2 billion and 1.4 billion for a solid thirty years. It popped north of 1.5 billion twice in 2002 and 2003 thanks to the confluence of three straight years of The Lord of the Rings. Otherwise, it was a fairly constant average of more than 1.3 billion tickets sold between 2009 and 2019. In 2023 that figure topped out at 828 million tickets divided mostly among 67 wide studio releases. That comes out to an average of about 12 million tickets sold per wide release studio film. Obviously, not all those tickets are going to studio films, but studio wide releases and their marketing drive the overall box office — so by dividing the number of wide releases into the total number of tickets purchased, we can get a broad, general sense of whether theatrical inventory correlates to moviegoing activity. For comparison, let’s look at 2019: approximately 1.2 billion tickets sold divided between 87 studio wide releases yields an average of roughly 14 million tickets per wide release film. Let’s go back even further to the high point of the 2000s, when studio wide releases exceeded 100 every year — specifically 2006 when 128 releases sold 1.4 billion tickets, averaging out to just under 11 million tickets per film. Finally, consider 2002’s record of 1,575,756,527 tickets sold, divided by 119 studio wide releases for an average of 13.2 million tickets per release.
If 2024 tops out, as expected, just north of 8 billion divided between 63 scheduled studio wide releases — that comes in at an average of almost exactly 13 million tickets per wide release — better than 2023 and on par with the record year of 2002. In the face of a perfect storm of challenges the industry has faced since 2020, that’s an enviable recovery by any metric. It tells us that so long as there are good films to see — audiences remain willing and eager to return and see them in a theater. Increase the inventory of quality wide releases and, as in previous years, the audiences will show up. The unresolved question is when will studios recognize that fact, stop trying to ween audiences off theaters and onto streaming (in search of an impossible boost in earnings which will never replace theatrical revenue) and meet that demand by once more filling up the theatrical pipeline that has always been their bread and butter?
Theaters are back…
Despite the seeming good news on the attendance front, there’s no question the exhibition industry is sending mixed messages — Metropolitan Theaters, the oldest chain in Los Angeles, recently announced they would enter bankruptcy reorganization under Chapter 11, following similar moves by Cineworld and Regal during the pandemic. Pacific Theatres, meanwhile, simply threw in the towel — leaving its venerated Arclight theaters, including the Cinerama Dome, to be someone else’s problem. Despite these struggles, however, it needs to be underlined that theaters aren’t going away. The Cinerama Dome — and other Arclights — are expected to reopen under new ownership and management next year. Netflix — in an attempt to shore up their bona-fides with cinephiles and soften their anti-theater image — recently unveiled a state-of-the-art renovation of the 97-year-old Grauman’s Egyptian in Hollywood which I was fortunate to attend — and which was undeniably spectacular. The festivities included Ted Sarandos doing an almost-convincing impersonation of a lifelong cinephile and a lovely 11-minute short film by Angus Wall entitled Temple of Film: 100 Years of the Egyptian Theatre (which, of course, can also be seen on Netflix so you don’t actually have to set foot in the Egyptian to see it). Elsewhere in Los Angeles, classic movie houses and movie palaces are being snatched up by filmmakers — Quentin Tarantino has given new life to both the New Beverly Cinema and the Vista Theatre while Jason Reitman and an all-star team of 35 other filmmakers (pictured above), are preparing to do the same for the 93-year-old Village Theatre in Westwood, adjacent to UCLA.
Upheaval in the exhibition industry, however, is not new — since the beginning of cinema, exhibition has undergone a death-and-renewal cycle countless times, almost always emerging better adapted to changing audience preferences than the major studios. The most recent such upheaval took place following the overbuilding of multiplexes in the 1990s, which yielded a spate of bankruptcies in the early 2000s as overall theater attendance was reaching record levels. Chains like Edwards Cinemas, Loews Cineplex, Carmike Cinemas, General Cinema, Mann Theatres and United Artists Theatres no longer exist — but most of the actual theaters still do. This has been a pattern since 1948 when the Paramount Consent Decree forced the major Hollywood studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, thus ending the era of “vertical integration” of production, distribution and exhibition. But the consent decree never quite achieved its intended aim (they never do). A certain number of independent producers and distributors may have enjoyed greater access to screens, but for the most part the studios continued to control the game, leveraging their dominance of content to extract favorable terms from the newly-independent theater chains which prevented them from becoming any kind of significant counterweight to the power of the studios themselves.
The lesson here is that audiences don’t care who owns the theaters or how marginal their business is. They care only about the convenience and quality of the theatrical experience. As long as there’s an audience for good movies, and good movies to be had, there will be theaters — and the business depends and counts on that.
This is where the HarrisX poll (and others) miss the mark. Streaming is not in competition with theatrical movies — it desperately needs them. Because movies are expensive, profitability has to be clawed back over time and through multiple channels of exploitation, all of which need a way of indexing the film’s value. For longer than most of us have been alive, that index is pegged to North American theatrical performance. What a film earns in North American ticket sales establishes a benchmark which facilitates accurate forecasts of what it’s likely to earn overseas, on television, on VOD and streaming, in merchandising and so forth. It’s for this reason that straight-to-video movies — and their digital spawn, “streaming originals” — have quite literally no cultural footprint whatsoever. They are, for all intents and purposes, valueless beyond their initial release. We know this because last November, then-Netflix film division chief Scott Stuber told us that the streamer’s attempt to compete with legacy studios by churning out at least one original movie per week had been a losing proposition — and that going forward, that output would be slashed in half. Stuber, it had long been rumored, repeatedly clashed with Netflix co-heads Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings over his belief that Netflix was relying too heavily on streaming and refusing to go toe-to-toe with the legacy studios in theatrical releases — so the November announcement felt at least partially insincere. It was an acknowledgement that “streaming originals” don’t really deliver the goods at the same time Netflix continued to resist the one distribution avenue — theatrical — which does. No surprise: ten weeks later Stuber had finally had enough and stepped down. Numerous observers, like Celluloid Junkie, had seen the writing on the wall as early as late 2022: streaming does not furnish any indexable value to any movie. Theatrical release does.
This point has been made most reliably by the Entertainment Strategy Guy (ESG), an anonymous guru whose analytical and predictive track record is second to none. You can also follow him on X/Twitter or Substack or read him at The Ankler here on Substack. In April of last year, the ESG broke it down with a typically exacting and indisputable deep, data-drenched dive on why studios need to release movies to theaters. More recently, he undertook a deeper dive on the “missing billions” which haven’t yet returned to the annual box office figures. It’s behind a paywall, but it’s worth it to read the analysis, which argues that it’s not a matter of audiences abandoning theaters — it’s studios and distributors leaving money on the table. I first addressed this phenomenon in a post comparing the Austin Powers films to the Dune franchise, pointing out how much more profitable the Austin Powers films became once New Line smartened up and realized that not giving them a strong initial release in theaters was costing them a fortune in downstream ancillaries. I predicted the same thing would be proved true when the lackluster day-and-date/streaming-and-theatrical release of Dune was offset by massive Dune: Part Two grosses from an exclusive theatrical release. As of today, the sequel is one weekend away from crossing $600 million globally with a final tally in excess of $700 million well within sight. Compare that to the previous film which topped out at just over $400 million and the indisputable value of theatrical release for indexing a film’s market value is clear.
Part of the reason for this is just basic economics — but the other part is psychology. Because all art and entertainment operate on the principle of scarcity, films released theatrically are deemed the superior product. As there are only fifty-two weekends in a year, and a limited number of screens available to each film for a limited period of time, theatrical release movies are deemed a premium product. To employ a sports analogy — they’re the big leagues, and that creates a symbiotic relationship which fuels profitability. Scarcity creates a perception of value — audiences reward that perception with dollars — earnings turn perception into reality.
This is where the HarrisX poll and those reporting on it are burying the lede — literally. IndieWire’s Tony Maglio states right up front:
A new poll by HarrisX, exclusive to IndieWire, found that 34 percent of U.S. adults prefer to watch movies in theaters, which means a solid two-thirds would rather wait for them to be released on streaming.
You will note that this does not support the conclusion that two-thirds of the audience prefers streaming movies to theatrical release movies. Quite the opposite, it says “two thirds would rather wait (emphasis added) for [theatrical release movies] to be released on streaming.” The only conclusion to be drawn here — without seeing the raw data — is that the superior value of theatrical movies is not in dispute. We may reasonably deduce that 100% of those polled agree that theatrical release movies are superior. It’s the cost-benefit analysis of the theatrical experience which reveals their disagreement. The number one reason listed by those who “would rather wait for [theatrical release movies] to be released on streaming,” identified by 53% of the two-thirds, was ticket price, followed by concession cost (42%). Though the “comfort of viewing at home” came in third at 40%, nearly all other reasons all center on deficits related to the theatrical experience — as opposed to the benefits of streaming at home: “concerns over sanitation and hygiene” (23%), “distractions from other members of the audience” (19%), “inconvenient travel” (15%), “selection of films” (13%), “inconvenient theater locations” (13%), “inconvenient show times” (11%) and “seat selection” (8%). What the HarrisX poll really tells us is “2 in 3 movie watchers prefer theaters — but half of them think movies are too expensive.” Which is another way of saying, “All things being equal — two thirds of filmgoers prefer theaters.”
Just for fun, let’s switch up the HarrisX poll results and hypothetically apply the same reasoning to the restaurant and food industries. If every restaurant within three miles of your home served gruel and cold porridge for upwards of $20 a bowl — wouldn’t you expect at least two-thirds of people questioned to say they preferred eating at home? Would that not be a clear market message that you need to a) improve your offerings and b) lower your prices? Naturally. In fact, we don’t even need to speculate on this point thanks to the sad story of MoviePass, the gimmicky subscription movie plan for cinephiles which struggled mightily from 2011 through 2016 until it finally went bankrupt not because people didn’t use it enough, but because they used it too much. The founders of MoviePass underestimated how much people would go to the movies if the experience were made more affordable — and so have the HarrisX pollsters.
The clear take-away from all of this is that by improving the quality of the films and the quality of the viewing experience, theaters would recapture substantial numbers of filmgoers — which, once again, is not news. It’s literally what Hollywood has had to do many times over — in the 1920s and 1930s with the advent of sound, from the 1930s through the 1950s with the advent of color, from the 1950s forward with the advent of widescreen and so forth and so on.
At the 2023 CinemaCon exhibitor convention, exhibition executives straight up told the studios what they needed from them. Hollywood can — and must — take this lesson to heart: do whatever it takes to bring audiences back to theaters, because theaters are the beating heart of the movie business.
Make movies great (and affordable) again…
On this point, I am not impartial. As a Gen-Xer, I belong to the last generation raised on movie theaters before the dawn of Betamax, VHS and “home video.” My first job out of high school, as a first year student at UCLA, was working at the now-demolished Mann’s National just down the street from the Village Theatre. In those days, Westwood Village and Hollywood Blvd. were living multiplexes, walkable European-style enclaves of classic, single screen cinemas which transformed weekend nights into a movie wonderland. Westwood at its peak was home to some twenty screens, seven of them single-screen houses. Three of those screens — the National, the Village and the main screen at General Cinema’s three-screen Avco — held more than a thousand seats. Premieres were a regular event, and the exhilaration of filmgoing spilled out onto the streets as theater patrons carried their post-screening conversations into restaurants and onto the sidewalks. While working at the National, I had occasion to meet Joe Dante, Bob Fosse, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Douglas Trumbull and Mann Theatres owner Ted Mann and his wife, former movie star Rhonda Fleming. I worked the premiere of Never Say Never Again, Bob Fosse’s sound check for Star 80, attended a demonstration of Doug Trumbull’s Showscan, drove Ted Mann’s Lincoln Continental, and saw Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom a total of six times before opening day. A short time later I was promoted to assistant manager at another now-demolished house, the Mann Plaza, where we hosted exclusive Los Angeles runs for such films as Purple Rain and The Killing Fields. What I learned about exhibition at the ground floor I would later bring to my role as a Senior Film Critic at the leading exhibition trade magazine, Boxoffice, where the entire editorial thrust was to serve the needs and interests of exhibitors.
I won’t deny that there’s sadness in walking Westwood these days — it’s a ghost town compared to its heyday, with only four single-screens remaining — including the Village and the Bruin (most recently seen in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) — and the Avco now carved up into six small screens. But, again, we’ve seen this story before — in the 1930s and 1940s. Before there was Westwood and Hollywood Blvd, there was the Downtown Los Angeles Broadway Theatre District, home to some of the most spectacular movie palaces ever built. Those palaces still stand — many are used for repertory functions — but as they always have, and always will, audiences moved on. What they did not do, however, was move away. They moved on to other theaters as new theaters and new theater neighborhoods opened — oftentimes with better technology, seats, food and amenities. Over time, however, theaters became more like living rooms, living rooms became more like theaters — and the quality of films overall plummeted, driven largely by the economics of the mulitplex: whereas single screens need good movies to lure audiences, multiplexes just need variety. While that philosophy worked in the 1990s, it no longer does — and audiences once again demand better value for their dollars. Does this mean better movies? Absolutely. Does it mean more theatrical wide-release movies? Definitely. Does it mean longer theatrical windows again? Possibly. Lower ticket prices or at least flexible pricing? It couldn’t hurt. Could it mean a return to single-screen movie palaces which lend glamour and extravagance to the experience which even the best home theater could not hope to duplicate? Judging from the photograph at the top of this piece — it’s pretty obvious that Hollywood’s very best filmmakers absolutely believe so.
The only question is when and how that message will get through to the legacy studios, who are increasingly beholden to the wildly uninformed fantasies of Wall Street — a subject on which I have previously written, and which was most recently tackled at the Ankler Podcast. Hollywood Heretic will have a great deal more to say about that topic in the coming weeks and months, but in the meantime it’s worth sharing a personal anecdote still very fresh on my mind. As I write this, I’m holed up for Spring break with my family at a Soho Airbnb in London. Mere hours ago we returned from seeing the stage musical of Mrs. Doubtfire at the 113-year-old Shaftesbury Theatre (originally New Prince’s Theatre) in the West End. To be clear, I am not a fan of the 1993 Chris Columbus-directed movie, which starred Robin Williams, and I have never read the 1987 Anne Fine novel. I was aware of the production from its brief, pandemic-delayed run on Broadway from October of 2021 to May the following year — but regarded it as yet another cynical attempt to pillage mediocre Hollywood IP for the New York stage. After some judicious retooling, the production returned for North American tour in April of last year, and opened in London a month later. What I saw this evening, as the production closes in on a year, was everything the movie was not — heartfelt, effulgent, inspiring and spectacularly well-directed and performed. It was magical and moving in ways we haven’t seen from the movies in a very long time. Judging from the ovation at the end — the sold-out audience of more than 1400 agreed. It was then that my wife noted the exchange between a mother and daughter seated directly behind her. “Live theater, better than the cinema?” the mother asked. Her daughter — who looked roughly nine years of age — beamed with delight and nodded.
As we exited the esteemed old Shaftesbury, where generations upon generations have performed and cheered, it was impossible to not be likewise moved by the ghosts of tradition lurking everywhere in its walls and decor. I would loved to have told the woman and her daughter that what they felt this evening was still possible in cinemas — that millions before them had experienced it; and that one day, God willing, the magic will return to cinemas — so long as we, the audience, demand it.
