Q12 - Box office receipts at movie

[csunnerberg13]

Please help!

[ohthatpatrick]

When we read these Paradox questions, we wanna frame our thinking with
Given that ____
how is it that ____?

So, for Q12, I would be thinking:

Given that twice as many movie theaters went bankrupt last year as in the previous two years combined,
how is it that box office receipts increased 40% last year over the previous year?

Or in simpler terms,
Given that more theaters are struggling, how is it that more tickets are being sold overall?

(C) tells us that the most profitable films last year were not shown in all theaters; they were only shown in a selection of the largest theaters.

So, to make this a little more visceral, let's say "Iron Man 3", "Star Trek 2", "Hangover 3", etc. ... all the biggest cash cows of this year's box office ... are only shown in the largest theaters.

Maybe people only wanna go see those movies this year, those movies all make hundreds of millions of dollars each, since the humongous theaters showing them have room to pack in tons of moviegoers.

Meanwhile, all the smaller theaters are showing boring dramas that no one wants to go see, so the smaller theaters are going bankrupt.

So (C) gives us a way to see how ticket sales could be up while tons of theaters are simultaneously going bankrupt.

It paints a picture of the largest theaters thriving while the smaller theaters (who don't get to show the profitable blockbusters) are struggling.

== other answers ==

(A) This goes the wrong way. We need to explain how it is that the movie industry overall is still thriving ... this makes it seem like profits would be harder to come by.

(B) This doesn't go either way. Ticket prices don't tell us anything about how many tickets were bought / how much revenue was brought in.

(D) This would explain why more tickets are being sold, but since the theater owners didn't shoulder any of the expense, it doesn't give us a way to understand why so many theaters went bankrupt.

(E) This goes the wrong way. This says that when more tickets are being sold, theaters should be thriving.

Hope this helps.

[JasminL758]

When I did the exercise, I kind of saw how the reasoning of C goes and I liked the reason, but I felt really uneasy about how it's phrased. So I picked B even I knew B is very weak and we need to make many additional assumptions to bridge the gap. C is saying last year those films that were successful were very profitable and shown at only the few largest theaters. It seems to intend to explain why these films were successful, NOT why only a few theaters were making money. And "successful" can be interpreted as award winning, wide international recognition, etc. instead of just making money. Even if the other smaller theaters only got those unsuccessful, low-quality movies, what if a lot of people paid to watch these trash movies because they were superficially entertaining and relaxing? I'd like C more if it's phrased like "last year most (or all) of the profitable movies were shown by exclusive engagement at only a selection of the largest theaters". I think bringing the ambiguous concept "successful" unnecessarily complexes the argument. Can someone please explain?