Hollywood Box Offices Are Back

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:14)
He's a Hollywood machine.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:16)
He is, his own Hollywood machine.

**Carol Massar** (0:18)
He's the individual behind our screen time world, behind the screen time newsletter. You can sign up for that at bloomberg.com/screentime. We're talking about Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg News managing editor of media and entertainment. He joins us from our Bloomberg LA situation. Lucas, it's like always sunny and nice out there. I know you come to New York sometimes, but LA is home, but we appreciate you joining us.
I want to talk about people going back to the movies this year, because something interesting is happening. You wrote about this recently, and I'm wondering, one, why people in your view are going back to the movies, and two, whether or not this is sustainable.

**Lucas Shaw** (0:57)
First one is tricky to answer. The good slate of movies, things that people were very excited about, so you had probably the highest volume of high caliber summer blockbusters in a long time. We tried to capture the lessons from those in an essay for Businessweek, and it's everything from having an appropriate window, delay between when a movie appears in theaters and when it's available at home, to bringing something fresh and different to the table, which sounds trite and obvious, but Hollywood has been in this pattern of releasing cinematic universes for the last 10 years. A lot of things that worked this year are either new movies that haven't been around in five or six years, something that felt fresh. In terms of whether it's sustainable, I think that just depends on whether Hollywood learns the right lessons from this.
Are they going to see obsession and instead just make a million different deals with other YouTube filmmakers? Are they going to find the right filmmaker and put the right infrastructure around them? Yeah.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:02)
We're still down a lot from the pandemic, Lucas.

**Lucas Shaw** (2:06)
Yeah. The sales are off, I want to say 10, 15 percent.
I should say the revenue is off. The ticket sales are off considerably more, but one of the reasons why revenue has recovered is higher ticket prices, the popularity of IMAX. One of the things that seems to happen is there's a little bit of enthusiasm around being a cinephile in filmmaking. People are excited about going to see a Christopher Nolan movie in 70 millimeter, or going to see Ryan Coogler in IMAX.

**Carol Massar** (2:41)
In other words, as you write, being a film nerd is cool again.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:44)
Yeah.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:46)
I haven't seen Odyssey yet, but I want to get to it next week. I want to get to it in the theater. I really don't want to see it at home.

**Carol Massar** (2:51)
Yeah, but it's 70 mil or just normal IMAX?

**Tim Stenovec** (2:54)
I don't know. What should we do? You've seen it, right?

**Lucas Shaw** (2:58)
I saw it in 70 millimeter, no IMAX, which is not what Christopher Nolan would want. I may go see it again in 70 millimeter IMAX, but there are only like 40 screens in the country that have that.

**Carol Massar** (3:10)
So you come to New York, Lucas.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:12)
Okay.

**Carol Massar** (3:13)
That's what we'll do.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:14)
There's still. Hey, listen, what I really think is cool is in this story, Businessweek actually polled people, studio chiefs, producers, talent agents, filmmakers, analysts and diehard film goers on the lessons. One of the things I did think was, I want to go to the first one, young people still want to go to the theater. So it is interesting. We talked about this being cool, but I think we keep thinking that some of these trends, young people are going to be doing things differently, but we still now hear like they weren't going to buy houses. Well, now they are maybe going to buy houses if they can afford them. But same thing for the theater. They are going back.

**Lucas Shaw** (3:50)
Yeah.
There was a feeling that young people would not be going to the movies anymore. And that has, I think, mostly dissipated. That was one of those pandemic era moments where because of the popularity of video games, because of all these other entertainment offerings at their disposal, people thought that young people had moved on. And I'm still reluctant to say, like, movie going is as popular with young people as it was before. But I think the notion that young people are just not interested in movies was clearly false. They just are interested in particular types of movies. You know, making Minecraft, which is a property that they love, was something that could get them to go to the theater and get them excited about it.