Crazy Nikki Finke has caught box-office fever. Her latest post is titled:

OFFICIAL! Summer 2007 Smashes Record

Gotta love the opening clause of her breathless report:

Because of (or in spite of) all those blockbusters and threequels, Summer 2007 today crossed the $4 billion mark, setting a new record for total domestic gross receipts.

Because of (or in spite of) the fact that movie ticket prices are always going up, this really isn’t a record summer. As I wrote below, 2007 is running a hefty percentage below audience tallies earlier this decade. Since there is a constant that can be looked at—in this case, actual attendance figures—this focus on dollar amounts isn’t a harmless fetish. It’s a smokescreen for the industry (”Hollywood setting a record!”) to obscure the truth (”Hollywood not setting a record!”).

Reading Finke is always a pleasure. Lower in the item, she gets around to mentioning the fact that actual ticket sales are below record highs. Here’s how she puts it; I leave her uneasy grammar and colorful punctuation intact:

[A]verage ticket prices in 2004 was $6.21 versus $6.85 in 2007. (Which is why Hollywood box office figures are starting to resemble baseball statistics with lots of asterisks after every record set…)

Why is this “starting” to happen? Hasn’t it always been that way? Why do we need asterisks? Wouldn’t we be able to eschew the asterisks just by focusing on the information that means something and ignoring the information that doesn’t? ? And I’m not a sports person, but aren’t the (very few) asterisks in sports based on extraordinary circumstances? Isn’t this movie issue the opposite, just the banal reality that prices always go up?