“As the box office closed out 2005, moviegoing was down 7% with about 1.4 billion tickets sold for the year. While studio executives disagreed over why theater attendance declined (some blamed the movies themselves, others cited the allure of DVDs and video games, and several others said the 7% slide was statistically meaningless), a number of industry leaders did concede that exhibition must improve if Hollywood is to prosper — stadium seating, in other words, is simply not enough.”
Blog
Dreams For British Dance
Ismene Brown has plenty of dreams for UK dance – starting with: “Wales at last has its own ballet company, and the new Welsh National Ballet, linking up with Welsh National Opera in lively opera-ballet bills, soon establishes an individual artistic identity, as Birmingham Royal Ballet and Northern Ballet Theatre have done in the Midlands and the North.”
Cultural Rehab
Newcastle and Gateshead are the poster cities for cultural renewal. “Gone is almost all the industry – steel, coal, warehouses, shipyards, docks – that made this one of the world’s great manufacturing centres. Instead of a culture based on the dignity of labour and trade is a theme park of heritage sites and palaces of art, liberally sprinkled with restaurants and cafés. Nineteenth-century industry has been transformed into 21st-century leisure. They call it urban regeneration, and here they’ve invented a new civic identity to characterise it – NewcastleGateshead.”
The New Seven Wonders
“The Acropolis in Athens made it, as did Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, China’s Great Wall, the Colosseum in Rome, the Inca temple of Machu Picchu in Peru, Stonehenge and the Moai – the Easter Island statues. Less immediately obvious choices in a final shortlist of 21 contenders for the New Seven Wonders of the World, announced in Switzerland yesterday, included the Kremlin in Moscow, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty.”
Why Are British Universities Segregated?
“The figures on the ethnicity of students at higher education institutions for 2003-04, provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa), reveal a deeply worrying racial divide among British universities. There are 53 institutions with less than 5% ethnic minority students. About 20 institutions have more than 40%.”
The Future Of Podcasting?
“If I had to guess, I would say that what we now call podcasting will soon vanish into a much richer soup of downloadable media. Our car stereos will download programs over wireless Internet connections, and they’ll be waiting for us when we strap on our seatbelts. Our TiVos won’t need to record TV shows in real time, because we’ll purchase the pre-recorded programs, and they’ll also be delivered via the Internet.”
The Movie Numbers Game
How is it that movie box office numbers for the weekend are announced before the weekend is over? “These box-office ‘results’ released over the weekend are simply a studio’s own estimate of its movie’s weekend performance. Distribution executives arise at dawn on Sunday mornings to crunch their numbers and report them to the media. Making a weekend projection on a Sunday morning is quite similar to how the media call political elections when they have the results of only a handful of precincts: You compare the numbers you have against some past results to make an educated guess.”
“Phantom’s” Record Run
This month, Phantom of the Opera will have played continuously on Broadway longer than any other show in history – 18 years. And three of the original cast members are still performing in the show. “After a special gala performance on Jan. 9, “Phantom” will have been performed 7,486 times, one more than “Cats,” which closed five years ago.”
A List of Broadway’s Ten Longest-Running Shows
Antiquities And The Rules Of The Game
“The laws governing the antiquities trade are now so complicated that no one can be sure of them, and the chain of ownership for any given object–even when it is traceable–may be so tangled that nobody knows who officially owns what. But there is more at stake today than the fate of an antique vase or even a curator’s freedom. What hangs in the balance is the very future of museums. Or to put it another way, “Whither the Elgin Marbles?”