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It's Expensive to Watch a Movie but It's Worth It Essay

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The drastic decline of moviegoers is a major concern for the film industry. It's quite shocking that so few people watch movies in theaters anymore. To put it in perspective, Jay Epstein mentioned that "in 1948, 65%, (90 million Americans) of the population watched movies compared to only 10 percent of today's population (30 million Americans)"(Epstein 1). The box office in 2005 has significantly declined in the third quarter by about 7% compared to 2004 and by about 10% in admissions (CNN Entertainment 1). Even though people still watched big budget films like Spiderman 2 and Star Wars, films don't seem to draw people into the theaters anymore.

The increase in movie ticket and concession prices turned many away from the cinema. The …show more content…

Adding to the already competitive entertainment market is the invention of online music and peer-to-peer file sharing programs such as Napster, Limewire, and Itunes. The teenage market, which contributes a majority of the entertainment income, can use programs like Napster to download movies and games to entertain themselves at little or no cost, so paying $9 to watch a movie becomes even less attractive when you can "watch it for free."

It appears that the answer to the box office decline is rather simple. Couldn't the film industries make films cheaper, improve the quality of their movies to please the audience, and lower the ticket prices? The problem is that it's not really possible to meet any of those demands considering what it takes to make a film.

Some complaints about films are that they aren't of the same quality as the ones in the past. On a technical standpoint, there's no truth in this statement. During the onset of theater, films were simple $400 to $500 productions made by people in vaudeville to go along with acts. Even blockbusters of the 1960s and 70s like Dr. Dolittle couldn't dream of using the technology we use today. The special effects of Dr. Dolittle peaked out at the invention of a clay snail. Nowadays we have the addition of digital-quality sound, color, computer-generated graphics, and voice actors (Wasko 5). In the past, people were glad just to watch a

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