Blockbusters, Franchises and the Televisionisation of Cinema

This paper explores commercial performance of movie blockbusters at the Australian box office since the 1980s (the Multiplex Era) and draws comparisons with the performance of big movies before that time. It finds that the scale of the theatrical release of films rose through the era, but the share of the box office earned by the very biggest films fell. Although there are now more big films at the Australian box office, the very biggest individual films of the Multiplex Era are generally smaller in cinemas than those of the pre-Multiplex Era. This does not necessarily mean that less people get to see particular blockbusters overall: there are now many more ways to see movies outside cinemas that did not exist before the 1980s, including pay TV, DVD and online. Nor does it mean that less people get to experience the story-worlds of the biggest movies, even in cinemas, because so many of the highest-grossing movies now are parts of franchises, or series of films. Unlike our finding for individual movies, our analysis concludes that, as a group, the biggest franchises of the Multiplex Era, especially those beginning in the late 20th and early 21st century, have outperformed their predecessors. We interpret these findings in two ways. First, they clearly show the distribution strategy for blockbusters in the Multiplex Era, involving bigger releases and more concentrated box office earnings in a shorter theatrical window. Second, the findings show a compressed cycle of cultural consumption in the cinema that has helped motivate a significant trend in the telling of a good deal of its most popular stories