In the previous post, I noted that the Police’s current tour will end up grossing in the neighborhood of $350 million; according to Billboard, this is the third highest-grossing tour of all time*.

Those numbers and that all-time status mean something: The money from touring is growing at an amazing pace. The industry finds ever-more people to pay ever-higher prices, and it seems like every five or ten years the top-grossing bands are bringing in double what they made on their last record-breaking tour.

Movie tickets are a slightly different commodity. Movie tickets prices go up, but only by about twenty cents or so a year; only this year did the average ticket price break $7. And attendance is dropping. But box office grosses and all the attendant hyperbole, nurtured along by breathless industry watchers, creates an illusion of success and broken records that the facts don’t back up.

The main mover behind box office records is marketing changes that have affected the way people go to movies. (Or I suppose it could be said that changes in the way people go to movies has affected the marketing.)

The Dark Knight made $158 million its first three days, breaking by about five percent a “record” set by Spider-man 3 last year, which did $151 million.

Two things. Of the papers I read, only the Los Angeles Times answered the obvious question:

The average movie ticket in 2008 costs $7.08, compared with $6.88 last year, according to Media by Numbers. By simple arithmetic, that means “Dark Knight” sold about 21.94 million tickets, compared with 21.96 million for the web slinger.

In other words, The Dark Knight’s record isn’t a record at all.

Second, let’s talk total grosses. Spider-man 3 set off the last bit of broken-record frenzy, but when the dust cleared the movie ended up grossing $336 million. According to Box Office Mojo, the invaluable box-office data web site, the film’s opening brought in some 44 percent of its eventual total earnings in the U.S.

$336 million is a lot of money, and puts the film just inside the top 15 highest-grossing movies in Hollywood history.

But that’s if you are using Inflated Hollywood Play Money. Adults use real money, which is subject to inflation.

Take that into account, and Spider-man 3 is number 92. The second Pirates movie, number 3 on the opening weekend list, is number 46 on the all time inflation-corrected list, and Shrek the Third, fourth on the opening weekend list, is 99 on the real money list.

Spider-man 3 is far behind not just true blockbusters like Jaws and The Sound of Music and Titanic—it’s far behind all sort of eh cinematic tripe like Twister and Smokey and the Bandit and Mrs. Doubtfire

In other words, Spider-man 3 held the last opening record, but it wasn’t all that big of an actual smash movie. It was a successful movie of which it could be said this: That a larger percentage than normal of its eventual audience went to see it on its opening weekend.

But that makes for a boring movie hedline, and wouldn’t really work in the bold-faced caps favored by Nikki Finke when she breathlessly reports on the film’s “box-office records.”

While The Dark Knight could break this pattern, the real record that it has broken is the one about which marketing campaign can get the most people who were going to see the thing anyway into the theater the first few days the movie is out.

You have to read far down in the coverage of The Dark Knight’s opening weekend in papers other than the LAT to get a hint of this. In the NY Times, the lede says the movie is “shoring up what so far had been a wobbly year at the movie box office.”

In the Wall Street Journal, the hedline reads, “Batman snaps Hollywood slump.”

Actually, attendance is down this year from last almost four percent, and last year itself was down almost ten percent from 2002, the industry’s last banner year. And when you take population growth into account the situation is even worse.

Both stories get around to mentioning that admissions are down, but almost apologetically. The writers’ hearts are really rooting for that wobbly, slump of a year to be shored up, or snapped, or something.

It’s part of a pattern in such stories, where some goofy claim is made and then, a graf or two later, contradicted by actual facts.

For example, in the Journal story, Lauren Schuker writes:

The big overall performance—coming in the midst of a tumbling housing market, high gas prices and other economic maladies—will add another example in support of one of Hollywood’s favorite claims: that the industry is resistant to financial downturns. Indeed, both ticket sales and box-office revenue in the U.S. have often held up during bad times, as they did in the wake of the dot-com bust earlier this decade. The argument is that movies remain less expensive than other recreational activities such as travel or professional sporting events.

An inch or two farther down the story, however, she tells us this:

But that doesn’t mean the theatrical film business is growing. In recent years, any increases in box-office revenue have generally been the result of higher ticket prices, not increased attendance.

But … that’s what you just said! That is what that means. You said the business was resistant to financial downturns, that sales were holding up during bad times.

Why not just say: “Hollywood may claim the business is resistant to financial downturns, but while Warner Brothers did indeed get a lot of the people who were going to see The Dark Knight anyway out to see it on its opening weekend, that doesn’t really mean anything. Movie attendance just keeps dropping.”

* After the Stones’ Bigger Bang tour and U2 Vertigo tour.