Box office revenue plunges to post-9/11 level

LOS ANGELES – Hollywood’s holidays are off to a dreadful start: Fewer people went to the movies the last two weekends than during the box-office hush that followed the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago.

Domestic revenues tumbled to a 2011 low of about $77 million this weekend, when the star-filled, holiday-themed romance “New Year’s Eve” debuted at No. 1 with a weak $13.7 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

It’s the worst weekend in more than three years, since the weekend after Labor Day 2008, when revenues amounted to $67.6 million, according to box-office tracker Hollywood.com. And it comes after an $81 million total a week earlier that had been this year’s previous low.

“It’s unbelievable how bad it is,” said Hollywood.com analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

Jonah Hill’s comedy “The Sitter” opened at No. 2 with just $10 million.

Divided by this year’s average ticket price of $7.96, the combined $158 million haul means only an estimated 19.8 million people went to the movies the last two weekends. Based on the average ticket price, this year’s top-grossing film, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” drew more people all by itself over opening weekend.

A couple of bad weekends don’t make a trend, yet domestic revenues have been lagging throughout 2011, a year in which many studio executives expected to do record business. Revenues this year are at $9.57 billion, about 4 percent below last year’s, according to Hollywood.com.

Revenues this past weekend are down 17 percent compared to the same period last year, when business totaled $91.8 million.

The slowdown the last two weeks followed a quiet Thanksgiving weekend, when new movies failed to pack in the projected droves.

Studio bosses generally blame bad weekends on bad movies. Yet while critics trashed “New Year’s Eve” and “The Sitter,” a lineup of well-reviewed, seemingly must-see family films that include “The Muppets,” “Arthur Christmas” and “Hugo” so far have done modest business at best.