Theater and Film are both prominent sources of entertainment for Americans and people around the globe. Americans purchase an average of 4.1 movie tickets every year. Broadway shows attracted over 14 million patrons this past season alone. It’s safe to say that acting is a revered art form in this country.
Theatre as an art form is much older than film. From the advent of live theatre in 5th century BCE, there would be generations and generations before the first commercial screening of a film occurred in 1895 in Paris, and even longer before the first sound film, or “talkie” was viewed in 1923.
As an aspiring screenwriter and playwright, I am always interested in the intersections between theatre and film. It is very important to me to stay up to date on the nature of these industries, both for general knowledge and so I can track the relevance of my chosen career.
Both industries are being heavily affected by technology. Movie theaters have realized a steady decline in loyalty, losing their dominance to the various streaming services, with a new one seeming to pop up everyday. Broadway theatre in particular has been popularized through social media, the most recent example being the cult following gained by Hamilton on various outlets.
Finding data points to use in this infographic was actually more difficult than I expected. It seems that there is no running collection of data on live theatre in the way that there is for cinema. Even the data for cinema was outdated and based on small survey groups of less than 3,000. I thought I would be able to find a database that would have information comparing the two, since the comparison is brought up so much, but no such data base seems to exist.
Another thing I feel like I partially struggled with was figuring out how to organize the data that I collected. It seemed to me that I was being redundant. I felt like all the data pointed to the same fact: more people go to see films than live theatre. I feel like the way I organized it was the most logical though and was pretty informative.
Overall, I think I chose a topic that was interesting to me but maybe not as interesting to everyone else as I thought. Live theatre is an art form largely ignored by younger people. I would imagine millennials are driven away by the high ticket prices. Apparently though, movie theaters are a dying institution as well. People figure, “why inconvenience myself with travel and a $12 ticket when Netflix or Hulu costs less than that per month?”
Around The Way with Alexsis 