Movie Audiences

For years, filmmakers flocked to the Cannes Film Festival to sell their independently financed movies, confident they'd soon see their work exhibited in movie theaters. Like so many show business dreams, those visions have been vanishing quickly as numerous distributors of film-festival fare closed their doors after losing money or corporate support. But there's a potential savior on the horizon called video on demand -- and it may be hiding somewhere inside your cable television box.

It's Valentine's Day, and the movie studios have rolled out chick flicks like bouquets for every gal whose husband or boyfriend has ever disappointed them. Thank goodness. Or so that seems to be the message from female moviegoers who have been lining up for women-enticing movies in droves. Last year kicked off with the wildly successful "Sex and the City: The Movie" followed by "Mamma Mia!" in the summer and "Twilight" in the fall.

Harry Potter, the teen wizard whose films have generated billions of dollars and become one of Hollywood's biggest franchises, is known for battling the evil Lord Voldemort. Now he's about to confront an even darker foe: A soft DVD market. "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth installment in the Warner Bros. film series, will be released July 15, and expectations are that it will be one of the year's biggest blockbusters. The previous five "Potter" movies have generated $7.

The mid-movie dash to the restroom can turn us into calculating Usain Bolt wannabes: Ah, this looks like a lull -- time to dash. When we return to our seats, we pray the answer to "What did I miss?" isn't "Darth Vader is really Luke's father" or "the girlfriend is really a guy." The website RunPee.com can help with such anxious guesswork. The site provides recommended opportunities to race to the restroom. It tells you when the action or romance wanes, and gives you a cue ("Baby O.J.

It's 8 p.m. Friday and the historic Towne Theatre downtown is sold out. About 500 moviegoers have crowded into the three-screen movie house, paying up to $12 a ticket to watch not the latest Hollywood blockbuster but instead the premieres of three Indian movies that are opening simultaneously in India. Tonight's showcase feature: the Tamil action thriller "Aadhavan" starring hunk Surya Sivakumar, who enjoys rock-star status among fans known to break out in cheers when his image appears on screen.

Audience tracking surveys are hardly perfect, but rarely are they as far off the mark as when "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" arrived in theaters three weeks ago. Having studied the various appraisals of moviegoer interest, executives at Sony Pictures concluded that, at worst, "Mall Cop" would gross $20 million in its first four days, with a high end of perhaps $25 million in domestic theaters. The actual Martin Luther King Day weekend returns: $39.2 million. Since its Jan.

Moviegoers were paying more in 2007, but that doesn't mean they were going more often. Box-office revenue in the U.S. and Canada climbed 4% to $9.7 billion, the second straight year of higher receipts after dismal results in 2005. But the rise came entirely from costlier ticket prices. Attendance was flat, according to research firm Media by Numbers. Moviegoers bought 1.

This weekend's box-office scramble looks like a photo finish between three feel-good comedies targeted at different audiences. "Juno" is indie. "First Sunday" is urban. And "The Bucket List" is AARP. With Hollywood executives expecting each movie to rake in about $15 million, the sprint for No. 1 will be determined by which film appeals furthest beyond its core constituency. Warner Bros.'

Call it a box-office battle of the sexes. Paramount Pictures' "Cloverfield," a monster movie described as "The Blair Witch Project" meets "Godzilla," and 20th Century Fox's "27 Dresses," a romantic comedy with Katherine Heigl, open today with dead aim on audiences as different as Mars and Venus. Conventional wisdom has the cleverly marketed "Cloverfield," a $25-million budget flick from "Lost" producer J.J. Abrams, plundering box-office records like its on-screen monster wrecking Manhattan.

The stakes in the industry's most competitive moviegoing season are high for all Hollywood studios, which spend heavily to sell their big-budget popcorn titles around the world. This summer, the risks are particularly steep for Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. studio, which has hundreds of millions of dollars riding on three major releases: “Speed Racer,” the Batman sequel “The Dark Knight” and “Get Smart,” a big-screen adaptation of the 1960s sitcom.