2009 Movie Attendance and the Economy
Last year I wrote about an interesting correlation between the strength of movie attendance and the economy. In 2008, movie attendance was slumping-off more than 7% from 2007. However, as 2009 comes to a close, movie attendance indicate that we as a collective are feeling much better about the economic future.
Cracking the Numbers
2009 recorded the strongest ticket sales in five years, crushing 2008 and posting up a whopping 1.42 billion tickets in just one year. My post last year Movie Attendance argued the point that since much of the movie going audience is a dependent of another person, the amount of tickets sold indicates how much consumers are willing to allocate to entertainment, a column of the budget unlikely to see any infusion during recession.
Could Just Be Good Movies
I’m not yet ready to declare that movie attendance should be considered as an economic indicator, but it does show some promise. Of course, the record numbers could just be happenstance, a product of the many high-budget and heavily promoted movies that came out in 2009. However, with the traditional economic indicators pointing every which way, I’m putting more faith in movie attendance than I am anything else. The trend is solid, even if the correlation isn’t, that people are more than willing to spend on entertainment. 2009′s huge increase as well as 2008′s dip seem to add some validity to the use of movie attendance as an economic indicator.
