Theatrical darlings of PPV

Feevee sees record '01 grosses from features

By JOHN DEMPSEY

Theatrical movies have become the darlings of pay per view, harvesting a record gross of $1.354 billion in 2001, a strapping 54% jump over the $879 million chalked up by films in 2000.

That number jumped out as the highlight of Showtime Event TV's annual review of the PPV industry, delivered by Kim Lemon, senior VP of research for Showtime, in a news conference in New York on Monday. SET draws on a number of sources, both published and private, to compile its figures.

Lemon contrasted the stellar economic performance by theatricals this year with the depressed numbers from PPV events, which actually declined in 2001 for the second year in a row. Mainly because of weakness in live wrestling and boxing, the event category managed to gross only $297 million last year, which was 23% below the $486 million collected in 2000. The $486 million in 2000 was 19% below that of 1999.

Event revenue is slumping, Lemon said, because the World Wrestling Federation, the dominant player in the category, has suffered from a dropoff in PPV buys. And the highly promoted World Championship Wrestling events disappeared from PPV early last year when the WWF shut it down temporarily after buying out its assets.

PPV also failed to deliver any prizefights that scored big in subscriber buys. The Felix Trinidad-Bernard Hopkins bout on Sept. 29 grossed $20.45 million, a middling payday compared to, say, the Evander Holyfield-Mike Tyson fight on June 28, 1997, which came in at $99.6 million.

But Mark Greenberg, executive VP of corporate strategy and communications for Showtime Networks, said he's counting on PPV offering a fight between Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis this spring, despite last week's turndown by a Nevada state commission of Tyson's request for a license.

Greenberg said a number of states have contacted Showtime and HBO, the promoters of the proposed Tyson-Lewis fight, with offers of a license to Tyson, despite the highly publicized brawl that took place last month at the weigh-in for the two fighters.

Boost from digital

On another issue, Lemon said the PPV industry is getting a substantial boost from the growth in digital households, both cable and satellite, which now account for a record two-thirds of all households with access to pay per view.

That growth is significant because digital TV offers an average of 42.3 PPV channels on satellite and 29.5 channels on cable, compared to a measly average of 3.1 PPV channels on analog cable. With so many digital channels, a hit movie is available pretty much when subscribers want to see it; they don't have to wait for up to two hours if all they have is analog.