A-List Stars Flailing at the Box Office (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

The New York Times ^ | August 21, 2009 | Brooks Barnes

[RayChuang88]

Besides making snacks for WAY cheaper, seeing a movie at home with a flat-panel widescreen TV and a good home theater system has these advantages:

1) Reasonable sound and picture quality.
2) You can quickly pause and/or replay parts of the movie/TV show on DVD/Blu-ray disc as needed.
3) You don't have to deal with rude audience members. The problem of a telephone call and/or pager call interrupting the movie makes no sense at home when you can pause the movie so you can answer the phone/page message.
4) Home video versions of movies are often the versions that the director originally intended, not hacked up due to mandates from the MPAA ratings board or hacked up due to time considerations.

[RayChuang88]

I think Streep makes her earnings primarily from taking a percentage of box office revenues, not paid a gigantic amount up front. She’s doing quite a few movies in her lifetime, and also has something that almost every other major actor in the entertainment industry lacks: real degrees in acting training from a distinguished university (Streep got degrees from Vassar and Yale for Drama, an achievement that is amazingly rare).