Television and the Future of Motion Picture Exhibition

SPOKESMEN for United States motion picture exhibitors have been sounding recurrent alarms about decreased box office receipts ever since the peak business of 1946 failed to play a return engagement. With the passage of time, however, even impartial observers have expressed growing concern about the present and future status of the exhibition branch of the motion picture industry. Various members of the industry have cited admission tax data, attendance figures, box office receipts, audience studies, and other evidence to prove that theater gross receipts have declined from 15 to 40 per cent since 1946. Fortune magazine felt reasonably safe last year in predicting that the movies had reached the end of an era. This year, Abram Myers, chairman of the board of the Allied States Association of Motion Picture Exhibitors, reported that between 5 and 0o per cent of the nation's theaters had been forced out of business. Another measure of the seriousness of the situa-