Movie blues

The lucrative summer movie-going season in North America ended on a lacklustre note this week as ticket sales limped to a new record while attendance slumped to a three-year low.

The US Labor Day holiday weekend, which marks the traditional end of summer, was led for a third round by Tropic Thunder. Ben Stiller's Hollywood satire earned an estimated $14.3 million (Dh52.52m) during the four-day period. It marks the lowest tally for a Labor Day chart-topper since 2004, when the martial-arts film Hero opened to $11.5m.

The DreamWorks/Paramount comedy, which Stiller directed and stars in alongside Robert Downey, Jr, has earned about $86.6m to date.

Four new entries were largely ignored, with 20th Century Fox's Vin Diesel sci-fi picture Babylon AD coming in at number two with just $12m.

The overall picture for summer was not particularly shiny, with a four per cent rise in the average US ticket price to $7.16.

Estimated sales inched up 0.43 per cent from last year's record to $4.2 billion, while the number of tickets sold slid 3.5 per cent to 586.9m, according to tracking firm Media By Numbers. The previous low for attendance was in 2005, when 563 million tickets were sold.

All this despite the massive success of The Dark Knight, pictured, which has grossed almost $505m to date across the US and Canada. Warner Bros Pictures' Batman sequel ranks as the second-biggest movie in history behind Titanic – before adjusting for inflation. The 18-week summer span generally accounts for about 40 per cent of annual ticket sales, and studios take advantage of school holidays to churn out big-budget sequels and superhero sagas aimed at Hollywood's sweet spot of male youngsters.

While the summer got off to a good start with the Paramount Pictures-distributed pair of Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which both earned more than $300m, overall sales have now fallen for six weekends in a row.

The Olympics and recessionary fears, not to mention such distractions as hurricane Gustav and the political conventions, have hurt business, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media By Numbers.

"People are becoming a bit more selective," he said.

No one would dare miss the big-buzz movies, but they may be inclined to wait for lesser releases on DVD, he added.

Year-to-date data presents a bleaker picture. Ticket sales are off almost one per cent to $6.6bn, and attendance is down 4.7 per cent.

Among the summer duds were Warner Bros' $120m family adventure Speed Racer and virtually everything released by Fox, including Space Chimps, The X-Files: I Want to Believe and Eddie Murphy's Meet Dave.

An official at the News Corp unit said the company's summer was "very disappointing", but added that all studios go through rough patches.

The Labor Day holiday also presages a relatively quiet few months during which the studios dump unpromising products so that they can then shift their focus to prestige pictures they hope will generate awards-season buzz. They got an early start on the first part of the strategy with Babylon AD, Don Cheadle's thriller Traitor, and a pair of comedies: Disaster Movie, and College.

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