The analytics firm Gower Street estimates that global sales of movie tickets in 2023 add up to $33.9 billion, an increase of 31% from 2022 but still 15% behind the last three-year average before COVID. - The Hollywood Reporter
In the US, Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc. In the EU, Canada, and Latin America, works by Dylan Thomas, Django Reinhardt, and Hank Williams. In most of Asia and Africa, everything by Picasso and Tolkien. - The Public Domain Review
For 31 out of 52 weeks, female acts topped the chart either as solo artists or in collaboration with other musicians. Miley Cyrus had the biggest song of the year, with the break-up anthem Flowers attracting 198 million streams. But new music was largely absent from the year's top 10 best-selling albums. - BBC
Winner of the week? Disney’s The Lion King, which grossed a massive $4,316,629, not only setting a house record at the Minskoff but a Broadway record for the highest single-week gross ever, a big achievement even when noting that the long-running musical played nine performances, as did other productions over the holidays. - Deadline
Christie’s reported a 20 percent decline in its total sales, plummeting from $8.4 billion in 2022 to $6.2 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s projected in December that its 2023 sales would total $8 billion, on par with the equivalent figure from the previous year. - ARTnews
If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then there should be nothing to fear, except that — what do you know? — a lot of humans have not been imagining anything more substantial. - The New York Times
"When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop – not his phone, his laptop – while I was in the middle of ‘To be or not to f***ing be’. I was pausing and (the stage team) were like, ‘Get on with it’ and I was like, ‘There’s no way’.” - The Guardian
The center’s latest report, titled Inclusion in the Director’s Chair, called the entertainment industry’s pledges to promote inclusion “performative acts” and “not real steps towards fostering change”. - The Guardian
Syriac, a 2,000-year-old tongue closely related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, is today the language of Iraq's Orthodox Christians, a community whose numbers have fallen from 1.5 million to 400,000 over the last twenty war-torn years. A new all-Syriac network is helping keep the language alive. - The World
Racism at work? Depends on what exactly one means by racism, and where — because the Metro Nashville Arts Commission reversed the new funding model, and the grants allocated under it a month previously, on the advice of its legal department. - The Tennessean (Nashville)
Customer defections across premium streaming services rose to 6.3% in November, from 5.1% a year earlier. About one-quarter of U.S. subscribers to major streaming services—a group that includes Apple TV+, Discovery+, Disney+, Hulu, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock and Starz—have canceled at least three of them over the past two years. - The Wall Street Journal
Just a year ago, Tanesha Payne created SumRset (adapted from her maiden name) to spread appreciation for contemporary dance in America's seventh-largest city, where it seems not to have caught on as strongly as in Houston or Dallas. - San Antonio Report
"I hope the 20th century ‘early music revival’ might be viewed as an important shift in outlook in the performance of music. Seeking to try to understand music from earlier times and being prepared to be influenced by historical sources, be they manuscripts, documents, instruments or iconography." - Continuo Connect
The Blu-ray and DVD releases of Oppenheimer, for example, sold out in a week or so. Some of this is the basic fan/collector impulse, but much of it is awareness that corporations can remove individual titles from streaming availability more-or-less at will, but they can't come and take your discs. - BBC
