Americans rediscover the cinema as DVD plummets

The movie theater came back in a big way last year with surging box office attendance in the United States, while DVD sales declined considerably.

A report from Adams Media Research (via Ars Technica) says movie theater spending was up 10 percent in 2009, jumping to $9.87 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, optical media sales, including DVD and Blu-ray, plummeted 13 percent, down to $8.73 billion.

By those measures, cinema spending fell short of making up for DVD sales revenue. An earlier report said home entertainment could be on the rise, but Adams’ report is limited to feature film revenue. When you factor in rentals and downloads, which according to Rentrak rose 8.2 percent when combined with Blu-ray sales, Adams says that overall film spending was down 0.3 percent in 2009.

The decline underscores a problem the film industry has been grappling with as Netflix and Redbox rise: People just aren’t paying top dollar to keep movies these days. The studios have exhausted themselves trying to stymie that trend by penalizing renters in various ways, relying on packaging gimmicks and even ensuring that old movies are destroyed instead of sold for cheap.

But the news of increased cinema attendance adds a new and ironic wrinkle to the story. While the studios try to stifle new business models in an attempt to preserve lucrative DVD sales, the old staple of cinema — movies in their purest form — took a sizable chunk of the business in 2009. I’d love to hear Hollywood argue that movie theaters are killing the industry, as they repeatedly have with Redbox.