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End of Summer 2011 Box Office

3 Oct

By Lurker

Since it’s past the ‘official’ end of Summer2011, we wanted to take a look over the box office results and see how our comic book hero’s stacked up this year. With 547 movies in release so far for 2011, the subject matter is all over the spectrum, therefore, we’ll be very selective in the movies we analyze.  To get us started let’s just take a quick peek at the overall box office trends.

Our favorite go-to site The Numbers  [1] has some interesting stats for 2011. No surprises here as the downward trend holds up.

Continue reading →

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A Picture of the Business of Circuses

21 Apr

The final article in our series highlighting Water for Elephants

By Lurker

In the novel Water for Elephants, we learn about the story of the Benzini Brothers Circus during the 1930’s depression in the U.S. In the story we learn that the circus’s ultimate demise is due to the financial collapse in 1931. During the story, we learn that the purchase of Rosie the elephant severely drained their cash reserves when they paid $2,000 for her with her own boxcar. Ultimately Benzini collapsed from cash flow problems due to lack of ticket sales and high expenses. Which had us wondering how much money did it take to have a traveling circus back then? How does that compare to today’s circuses like Cirque de Soliel and Ringling Bros? Considering all these companies are private, exact revenue numbers are not available. So we’ll do some extrapolation and hope to paint a picture of the business of circuses. Continue reading →

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The Price of Entertainment: Part 2

28 Mar

Our continuing series on Water for Elephants

By Lurker

In the Sara Gruen novel Water for Elephants, we are introduced to the ‘ultimate prize’ for a circus, an elephant and her name is Rosie.  So why is it that we are all fascinated by elephants? Is it their grand size, their graceful nature or their intelligence? Whatever the reason there is no doubt that in the upcoming movie, an elephant will make a grand entrance and capture our fascination. For many years elephants have been part of the circuses and zoos, however, their upkeep and maintenance at some facilities has been less than stellar, as we noted in our Part 1 article. Elephant populations around the world are diminishing due to human encroachment drastically reducing their natural habitats and poaching. Continue reading →

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Movies Released Straight to DVD

14 Mar

By Lurker

Have you ever stopped to consider why a studio would release a movie straight to DVD? We did and decided to take a deep dive and investigate movies released in 2010. By referencing our go-to site The-Numbers.com, we looked for movies that were categorized as DVD-premiere for our starting point. An important note that DVD sales totals are sketchy and many are not reported. So while in previous articles we examined box office sales, we won’t be able to provide that same analysis. So let’s see what statistics we were able to find and see where we end up… Continue reading →

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Did African American’s go MIA in Hollywood? Part-2

3 Mar

By: Lurker

Part-2 of this series will focus on how well films featuring African American stories and actors perform domestically versus internationally.  In the same way we analyzed the numbers from our previous article Battle for the box office, we evaluated the numbers and percentages. One trend carried over from that first article where I am Legend and Hancock stood out. However, in part 1 the questions regarding why centered on two ideas, slow output and lack of knowledge of consumer demands. So let’s see what’s going on…  Continue reading →

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