Exit signs

For 19 straight weekends box-office receipts lagged behind the same weekends in 2004 | Timothy Lamer

Hollywood set a record this year that it would probably like to forget. For 19 straight weekends box-office receipts lagged behind the same weekends in 2004, the worst year-over-year losing stretch since the industry began tracking the statistic 25 years ago.

The good news for theater owners: A strong opening by Fantastic Four (see "story") during the July 8-10 weekend finally broke the slump.

The bad news: The 19-week slump seems to be part of a larger three-year trend of Americans making fewer trips to movie theaters, a trend that shows no signs of ending soon.

The pivotal year for movie attendance appears to be 2002. Theaters sold 1.63 billion movie tickets that year, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners. But then ticket sales began a long, steady decline, falling to 1.57 billion in 2003 and to 1.53 billion last year. Through June of this year, only 654 million movie tickets were sold, a drop of 9 percent from the first six months of 2004, when theaters sold 720 million tickets.