Hollywood stages fight-back with $4bn summer

HOLLYWOOD lived its own second-chance Rocky story this summer as a business that looked to be going down for the count two years ago rebounded with record revenue.

The movie industry had its first $4 billion summer according to box-office tracker Media By Numbers. That was up 8% from last summer.

Hollywood did not set a movie attendance record, though. Factoring in annual rises in admission prices, about 606 million tickets were sold this summer, but the season was only the sixth-best for modern

Hollywood, whose biggest summer for attendance since the golden age of the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s came in 2002, when 653.4m tickets were sold, according to Media By Numbers.

“The movie industry is alive and well, in comparison to maybe what was being said a few years ago,” said Rory Bruer, head of distribution for Sony, which started the summer with a record-breaking $151.1m opening weekend for Spider-Man 3 and also released Superbad, which is on its way to becoming a $100m hit.

Spider-Man 3 was quickly followed by DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the third instalments in those three franchises all shooting past $300m domestically.

While there were a couple of box-office underachievers, Hollywood was conspicuously free of outright bombs this summer.

Chris Aronson, senior vice president of distribution for 20th Century Fox said: “The demise of the movie business is very premature. It’s a healthy business as long as the quality of the movies is there.”

For the full year, movie revenues are up 7% and attendance has risen 2.5% compared to last year.