The Vanishing Moviegoer

Movie theater owners, who have long warned that films on television are destroying Hollywood, got some startling statistical support last week. The bad news, contained in a report on movie-going by Business Analysts Sindlinger & Co.: since the TV screens last fall started to flicker for fair with movies, average weekly theater attendance has dropped 7,000,000 from 1956 figures, and theater owners have taken a $50 million loss at the box office.

For theater owners, 1957 started well enough. Average weekly attendance was up as high as 6.2% in the first six months, compared to the previous year. Then a summer decline set in that was drastically accelerated by the fall deluge of television movies. In the last six months of 1957, attendance fell as much as 17.5% below 1956 figures. Box-office business will probably get worse if post-1948 films are peddled to television in the same volume as their predecessors. Some 300 post-1948 movies have already been sold down the channel, including such quality films as High Noon. This trend, warned the report, could be "a death blow to theaters and production."

Some theater owners still take heart from the rising revenues of big-budget films released late in 1957 (Sayonara, The Bridge on the River Kwai), urge Hollywood to lay off the potboilers and shoot the works on the big movie. Exactly, says Veteran Independent Samuel Goldwyn (Guys and Dolls). Goldwyn believes that within a year Hollywood will be producing only half as many pictures as now, but adds, "They will be better pictures," sees the industry heading for a "healthier condition than it has ever known."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.