Hollywood Needs a Bailout! (Seriously folks...)

From New York Magazine: How was your summer? Hollywood’s was terrible. During a season movie studios count on for a little less than half their annual gross, domestic ticket revenue dropped 8 percent in July and 10 percent in August. Attendance is at a twenty-year low. Tent-pole films intended to prop up balance sheets instead produced red ink; the ill-conceived Battleship erased the profits of all other films Universal released last quarter, while Sony and Warner Bros. are expected to see hefty losses on Total Recall and Dark Shadows. Some of these economic wounds, true, are self-inflicted. But the movie business has reached what ICM partner Chris Silbermann calls “an inflection point.” Things have gone so haywire that the studios might not be able to break the cycle of ever-costlier flops without getting some outside relief. Funny as it sounds, Hollywood may need its own Washington bailout — in this case not in an injection of stimulus funds but a change to an old law that feeds many of its worst habits….

Find out more at http://www.vulture.com/2012/09/hollywoods-box-office-problem.html