The incredible shrinking Hollywood box office—and what can be done to fix it

The box office continues to trend in the wrong direction for Hollywood, and now it’s reaching historic lows. What can be done?

Per calculations made by Deadline, Hollywood just suffered its worst box office weekend since 2014, and the culprits aren’t so obvious as Hurricane Harvey making landfall on the coast of Texas or Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather drawing eyeballs away with their boxing spectacle Saturday night.

If you do some research into why Hollywood continues to see box office numbers fall, there are any numbers of factors to blame. Hollywood has a “millennial problem.” (Those damn millennials, killing just about every industry imaginable.) Hollywood has a “family movie problem.” Hollywood has a “sequel problem.”

But maybe Hollywood just has a bad movie problem.

It’s easy to blame the changing landscape and the very way we consume media for the film industry’s diminishing returns. According to The Atlantic, the average American buys only four movie tickets a year. But is that because millennials are too busy with their Netflix and their Hulu, or because there’s nothing to see?

Because “it’s more expensive to create an audience for a film,” per The Atlantic, Hollywood has relied heavily on sequels to bring in ticket sales—and in so doing, has basically devalued its own product.

“Sequels of late have fallen on rough times,” said box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian in 2016, via The Hollywood Reporter.

“The tried-and-true formulas and familiar characters and themes that are the cornerstone of the modern sequel have acted as a de facto life insurance policy against box-office failure. However…the landscape has been littered with a series of sequels that have come up short.”

And therein lies the problem.

Clearly, sequels have always gotten theatergoers in the door; once you become invested in particular characters or a particular world, you’re more likely to want to return to it again and again.

But original titles are often developed for years, either before or after they’re sold to a studio and put into production. The writers hone the story and fight for their vision.

Sequels are often spearheaded not by the creatives who spawned the story in the first place but by studio executives. Often, writers and producers don’t return for the second (or third, or fourth…) installments in a series. This creates a total disconnect between what viewers responded to in the first film and what they are given in subsequent ones, ultimately alienating them.

With such substandard fare as The Emoji Movie (8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), The Hitman’s Bodyguard (39% rating) and The Dark Tower (16% rating) on offer in late August, it’s no surprise moviegoers aren’t flocking to the cinema.

In fact, summer hits Wonder Woman and Baby Driver‘s runs have been extended, in part because pther distributors don’t have anything better to put out.

“You know it’s a rough summer when the top hits of June are resurrected in August in order to reinvigorate a sleepy movie marketplace,” Dergarabedian said, per Deadline.

There’s also the question of audience; with the global box office so often outperforming the domestic, films are often geared toward the greatest common denominator to make them universally appealing. But that can so often also make them insipid.

With theaters getting better screens, better audio, and those super comfy leather recliners, it’s still a very pleasant experience to go to the movies, and tickets cost about as much as a fancy cocktail.

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But unless studios can begin to prioritize good writing, good storytelling, and original content, people will choose to stay home and stream incredible original content from the comfort of their couches.