The beginning of the end of Hollywood in terms of Movie Attendance started in about 1966 with the new avant garde films being made and Midnight Cowboy, an X rated film, put it in the hole. Attendance never recovered. In about 1965 75 million people were going regularly to the movies, 10 years later about half that was left.
Today even worse.
I think that coincided with everyone having a TV, and then Cable TV.
I was a regular moviegoer in the sixties, and toward the middle of the decade, I noticed something was changing about movies that I couldn’t really put my finger on. Sure, John Wayne was cranking out a lot of good movies, but still, I sensed that something was wrong.
For example, war movies weren’t quite the same-—they seemed to be getting more anti-war. I went to see “Up from the Beach” in 1965 thinking it was going to be like “Merrill’s Marauders” or “The Longest Day,” filled with action and heroics but ending with the USA triumphant, but it turned out to be a stupid movie about the evacuation of civilians from the Normandy beach head.
And with the notable exceptions of “Torn Curtain” and the classic “Dr. Zhivago,” both from 1966, Hollywood also seemed increasingly reluctant to take on Communism or the Soviet Union. James Bond went from tangling with Soviet agents to fighting a crime syndicate. In “The Fantastic Voyage,” the Soviets, who were clearly the bad guys, were referred to as “the other side.” And movies about the Cold War such as “The Russians Are Coming,” “The Bedford Incident” and “Ice Station Zebra” always ended in a standoff, never a victory for the West.
From what you wrote about movie theater attendance, maybe I wasn’t the only one who sensed that something was wrong in Hollywood beginning in the mid-sixties.