7 August 2008 10:38 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news
Although the film industry has generally boasted that it is immune to economic slowdowns, a new study suggests that moviegoers are already seeing fewer movies at the multiplex. As reported by today's (Thursday) Wall Street Journal, a study by Los Angeles-based market-research firm Interpret Llc found that 52 percent of respondents are cutting back while only 5 percent said they are going to the movies more often. While studio executives have argued that a slow economy is actually good for their business because movies offer low-cost entertainment, analysts have observed that films must now compete with even lower-cost entertainment. "You can't compare how this slowdown might affect the movie industry to previous recessions," industry analyst Hal Vogel told the Journal. "The industry still has a degree of recession resistance, but this time around there is all this new technology and all these new distractions for moviegoers -- you didn't have Web episodes and cable television and computer games coming out of your ears in the past."
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