’07 b.o. a record in waiting

Boxoffice coin in the U.S. ought to tip the scales at slightly less than $10 billion this year, an all-time record, followed by a couple years of anemic growth as higher ticket prices offset slightly declining attendance.

That’s the word from Wedbush Morgan Securities, which issued a 40-page report Friday on the state of the exhibition industry. Wedbush concludes that the dour predictions of new technologies dooming the movie theater were overblown and reiterates that it was the poor quality of movies that caused exhibition revenue to stagnate, or worse, from 2003-05.

“Consumers are showing, through their continued attendance, that pay-per-view, DVDs and streaming media may be increasingly close substitutes for a movie-watching experience, but they are not as close of a substitute for an evening out,” Wedbush analyst William Kidd wrote.

Consumers with the most entertainment gadgets and services also are the ones who go to movie theaters most often, according to Nielsen Entertainment/NRG data.

For example, among moviegoers who see an average of 10.5 films in theaters each year, 46% of them are Netflix subscribers and 68% have a home theater. Among those who see just 7.1 movies in theaters each year, 16% subscribe to Netflix and 16% have home theaters.