Piracy Continues Killing The Movie Business To New Record Highs

from the yet-again dept

So, earlier this week, the MPAA came out with its annual report that shows that once again, its box office take hit new record highs. This same thing happens basically every year, so we almost didn't cover it at all this year. It's kind of old news. But people keep submitting it, and so we'll oblige, but mainly for the chance to repeat BoingBoing's awesome title on its story over this: Motion picture industry continues to stagger under piracy with mere record-breaking income.
You can read the MPAA's full PDF right here, though for reasons that make no sense at all, they will block you from reading the PDF if you have javascript or cookies disabled. For a PDF? Really guys? There is no reason at all that anyone ever needs cookies or javascript to read a PDF file.

The report further notes that ticket prices have continued to rise pretty consistently over the past decade from a $6.21 average price in 2004 to $8.13 last year. For an industry supposedly being destroyed, you'd think they wouldn't be able to get away with raising prices... but, apparently (as we've been pointing out for nearly two decades) going to the movies is a different experience than downloading a film and people are paying for that experience.

And, yes, just to cut off the line of criticism: this only applies to theatrical revenue, and not home viewership. But that's somewhat a red herring, given that, if left to the movie industry, there basically would be no home video market to speak of at all.