Hollywood's Immorality -- Hitting Them Where it Counts?

Um, this is news? I know the Jackson trial is over, but I don't think we needed a poll to find this out...

Most Americans think movie stars are poor role models and almost half say movies generally aren't as good as they used to be, an AP-AOL poll found.

Australian star Russell Crowe's recent arrest for throwing a phone at a hotel employee is the latest in a long line of unflattering incidents involving major movie stars. Christian Slater faces charges he grabbed a woman's buttocks in a New York City grocery; Winona Ryder was convicted of shoplifting in 2002; and Hugh Grant was caught in a car with a prostitute in the mid-1990s.

Those occurrences, combined with most Americans' preference for watching movies at home, suggest the industry faces challenges if it is to reverse a recent drop in attendance at movie theaters.

Movie stars don't set a good example, said Earl Ledbetter, a movie fan who lives in Ventura, Calif.

"They just don't have the morals," he said. "They marry and divorce, sleep around a lot."

Almost three-fourths, 73 percent, said they would prefer to stay home and watch a movie on their DVD player, VCR or on pay-per-view. That's more than three times the number, 22 percent, who said they prefer to watch films at a theater, according to the telephone poll conducted by Ipsos for The Associated Press and AOL News.

Almost half, 47 percent, said movies are getting worse, while a third said they're getting better.

Hollywood's domestic revenues through last weekend totaled $3.85 billion, down 6.4 percent from 2004. Factoring in higher ticket prices, the number of people who have gone to theaters is down 9 percent from last year, according to industry estimates.

After a strong start this year, movie business entered a prolonged slump, with revenues down the last 16 weekends compared to 2004. The wild card in comparing this year's revenues to 2004's is Mel Gibson's unexpected blockbuster last year "The Passion of the Christ," which drew a huge audience of Christians who were not regular movie-goers.

Oh, great. Blame the Religious Right for this, too.

I wish this indicated some great awakening of morality in America, but I tend to doubt it. People who aren't going to movies because Hollywood's stars are amoral jerks likely made that (admirable) choice years ago. Maybe Cinderella Man is suffering at the box office because of the bad timing of Crowe's arrest, but I don't think that's the reason for any industry-wide slump. Sure, that's anecdotal, but I think Hollywood's problem is the increasing competition it faces for our entertainment dollar. Why go to a theater and deal with the attendant hassles and expenses when a cheap pay-per-view movie can be watched on a big screen hi-def TV?

I don't know that the willingness of more Americans to catch movies at home is indicative of anything more than the fact that we have more options for our entertainment. But if they want to attract a larger audience of people who don't normally go to the movies, maybe Hollywood should make movies for those audiences. Gibson's success could be an object lesson for Hollywood.

Then again, we'll probably just get nine Bruckheimer movies instead.