Difference in Opinion

Over at Advertising Age, they are reporting that movie ticket sales were down a whopping 27% from the previous year, and that many people are blaming Halo. It seems that all the people that were busy spending $170 million the first day Halo 3 came out, were in their houses playing the game the weekends following it’s release.

The hilarity I find in it all is that the movie industry acts as if this is a huge surprise, as if Halo 3 came out of no where. Halo 2 made around $125 million it’s opening day, and much more than that to date. The game has yet to die out with some people still fond of the second version and others too broke to buy an Xbox 360 and the third game. It should be no surprise that this latest game would outsell it’s predecessor. It was marketed like a movie, with the Master Chief plastered over anything from a Mountain Dew bottle to a sponsored Nascar stock car. With that kind of promotion, and that kind of hype, the movie industry should have used that as a licked finger to test the wind for the storm that was coming.

Regardless of how prepared movies were, they did suffer a big loss in the past few weeks. “The Heartbreak Kid“, for instance, was expected to gross around $25 million dollars opening weekend, which would account for about half of it’s $60 million dollar budget. Instead, it ended up making a measly $14 million in the US and Canada. It wasn’t just that movie that took a hard blow. Sales for the whole weekend were 27% lower than last year, which made it the worst October weekend for movie sales since 1999.

Are videogames and movies competitors? I guess videogames restrict the gamer to their house, conflicting them from going out and seeing a movie, while if you are out at the movies, you can’t be home playing your game. Gaming is free though (except for the price of the game), which is attractive to young teens with not much money to spare. The movie industry should come to expect video games to be a threat, either that or capitalize off their success with adaptations like Resident Evil. With other blockbusters like Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed, Rock Band, Guitar Hero 3 and Grand Theft Auto 4 just around the corner, I can only assume the videogame industry will be under the microscope even more in the not so distant future.

Source: Bad Box Office? Blame ‘Halo’