Foreign Films Translate Into Growing Revenue Stream

Foreign film admissions revenue increased 18.7 percent to $216 million in 2006, according to new data released from the U.S. Census Bureau.

This information is from the 2006 Service Annual Survey: Information Sector Services, a series of tables that are part of a larger package on economic activity in several service industries. It includes companies that produce and distribute information and cultural products, as well as the companies that provide the means to transmit or distribute these products.

Some other establishments in this survey are publishers of newspapers, books and periodicals; motion picture companies; broadcast companies; telecommunications companies; and Internet service providers.

Total movie theater operating revenue in the United States was $11.1 billion in 2006, with ticket sales making up 66 percent of the total. Domestic feature films provided the lion’s share of box office receipts, amounting to $7.1 billion of the $7.3 billion sold, while admission to foreign films made up 3 percent of that revenue at $216 million. Foreign films include such titles as “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Lives of Others,” the latter winning an Oscar as best foreign language film.

Revenue from admission to domestic feature films remained flat in 2006 after a 4.9 percent decline in 2005.

Twenty-nine percent of movie theater operating revenue came from the sale of food and beverages.

Other details about the information sector include the following:

-- Broadcast television revenue was up 5.6 percent, achieving a level of $38.3 billion while revenue for cable television (and other subscription programming) gained 8.0 percent to a total of $38.4 billion.

-- Music publishers showed a 22 percent increase in revenue to $5.1 billion.

-- Sound-recording industries saw a 13 percent increase to $869 million.

-- Revenue for newspaper publishers showed a 1.7 percent decline, falling to $48.9 billion.

-- Revenue for radio networks showed growth, up 33.7 percent to $4.4 billion, while radio stations revenue remained flat at $13.7 billion.

-- Revenue was down 9.4 percent for greeting card publishers. Greeting cards made up $2.9 billion, or 70 percent, of the $4.1 billion greeting card publisher revenue.

More detailed statistics in this information sector, such as revenue, type of revenue and revenue by type of customer, operating expenses and inventories, can be found in the tables of this report at <http://www.census.gov/svsd/www/services/sas/sas_data/data.htm>.

Other Census Bureau data on the information sector: For 2005
estimates from County Business Patterns on number of employees, payroll,
and number of establishments, and by state, see <http://censtats.census.gov/cgi-bin/cbpnaic/cbpsel.pl>.