Movie theaters are clearly dead. Clearly.

IT'S FUN SUNDAY MATH TIME WITH VARIANCE!

•The top ten films in the country grossed approx. $215 million from Friday to Sunday.

•The average ticket price in 2010 (counting 3-D) was $7.93. Let's assume it's now $8.50 so nobody argues.

•That means 25 million people went to the movies this weekend to see one of the top ten films.

•Knowing that there are 303 million people in the US, that means...

At a minimum, 8.3% of the people in the United States of America spent 2-3 hours at a movie theater Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Oh, and if you add in the six million that went on Thursday, that goes up to 10.2% of the country, or 31 million people. Remember- that's just for the top ten movies. Doesn't count the arthouse films, doesn't count the foreign films, doesn't count the older studio films.

So, movie theaters are dying? No.

Here's a thought. Every single year, from roughly March to early May, there's an awful lot of hemming and hawing (and column inches) about the disastrous fall-off in business at movie theaters. The more aggressive prognosticators of the chattering class pipe up and say "they're dying!". And then, every Memorial Day, something opens huge and everyone stops and says "hmm, ok, the slump is over!"

I suspect the truth is far simpler: movie theaters aren't dying, but people are unwilling to go to them if there's nothing playing that they want to see.

What did studios feed audiences for the first four months of the year? The top grossers pre-Fast Five were a quartet of forgettable kids movies (Rango, Rio, Hop, Gnomeo and Juliet), an Adam Sandler-Jenn Aniston pair-up that I'd forgotten entirely about, and The Green Hornet. People didn't go see those films because they were excited about them, they went in spite of them- out of sheer cabin fever.

Compare that to the top films 2010- Alice In Wonderland, $400 million of Avatar's gross, How To Train Your Dragon, Shutter Island, Clash of the Titans. None of these are exactly classics, but they all made more money than anything that dropped in 2012. Hell, weeks 3-17 of Avatar made more than the top four pre-Fast Five 2011 films.

So here's my groundbreaking hypothesis- if studios put films out that people want to see on a consistent basis, people will go to the movie theater on a consistent basis. If studios give up from January 5th through May 1st, audiences will stay home until May 2nd. THOR is looking like it's going to top out around $170 million. What do you want to bet that could've been more like $250 million had it dropped in early April with no real competition?

Is attendance down? It is. The recession and 9% unemployment doesn't help matters, and neither do $15 tickets for 3-D movies nobody really wants to see in 3-D. And every time someone goes to the theater, watches a film that looks like it's projected with a goddamn flashlight, and writes an article about it, that doesn't exactly help the cause. But a weekend like this proves that people will go plunk down their $10 if there's something they feel is going to be worth it.

Our prescription remains the same: make better movies, don't release them all in a ten week timeframe, make sure theaters do a better job showing them, and audiences will continue to line up.