I’m guessing at this very moment there’s a pair of black tuxedo trousers awaiting service in a dry cleaners somewhere in southern California.
Inside one of the trouser pockets is a single sheet of crumpled paper, an unread acceptance speech that begins in the spirit of, ‘I’d like to thank so many people, starting with my blah blah…’, and ends something like: ‘I'VE CONQUERED THE THIRD DIMENSION...I AM THE EMPEROR OF THE UNIVERSE! etc.’
Of course, James Cameron wasn’t the only runner-up at last Sunday’s Oscar® ceremony. But he’s certainly become the most talked (and written) about. Still, there’s surely consolation in knowing that Avatar has generated revenues that would bring an embarrassed flush even to the cheeks of the Goldman Sachs board (worldwide box office gross total currently stands at around $2.6 billion according to The Numbers).
By last weekend (5-7 March), Avatar had shifted nearly £89 million worth of cinema tickets in the UK. It is by far and away the largest haul in recent box office history, and a quite staggering achievement. But that doesn’t mean there’s been a bonanza in cinema admissions during the twelve weeks since the film was first released, as the latest UK admissions numbers released by the Cinema Advertising Association show. That’s because Avatar’s commercial success has been boosted by the higher ticket prices charged for digital 3D screenings.
According to the CAA figures, January saw 14,583,485 admissions, a mere 0.5% rise over the same month in 2009. The inclement weather played its part: ice and snow brought what headline writers describe as ‘travel chaos’ to much of the country. Even so, January 2010 narrowly recorded the highest admissions for the month since 2004, and Avatar generated the lion share.
Figure 1: January cinema admissions, 2002 to 2010
Source: Cinema Advertising Association/ Rentrak
By the way, it’s all change over on the Digital Cinema Media (DCM) web site. DCM (Carlton Screen Advertising, as was) is one half of the Cinema Advertising Association (along with Pearl & Dean), and they’ve recently revamped their online shop window.
Fortunately DCM has retained the bit of most interest here, UK monthly admissions data, although the section is no longer labelled as such. DCM now describes admissions as ‘impacts’, which is marketing speak for eyeballs on screen, as opposed to bums on seats in old parlance. It's a purely semantic difference because the underlying data are exactly the same.
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