No matter how the year is spun, the trends at the domestic box office in 2011 are troubling.
Attendance was at its lowest mark since 1992, when only 1.17 billion tickets were sold in the U.S. and Canada. With less than a week left in 2011, about 1.23 billion movie tickets have been purchased -- 106 million fewer than last year, 279 million fewer than 2009 and 108 million fewer than 2008.
Those who did buy tickets, meanwhile, grew older, with numbers of younger audience members continuing to dwindle.
Also read: They May Be All Right, But Are Kids Running Away From the Multiplex?
Year-to-date revenue is down 4.9 percent compared to this point in 2010 and 4.5 percent compared to this point in 2009.
And perhaps most concerning, creativity is down, too -- of the top 10 earners this year, seven were sequels, one was a reboot and two were based on comic books.
Of course, in a year during which the motion-picture business flirted with disaster on several occasions, things could have been worse.
The market was down more than 20 percent year-to-year at one point in the first quarter, but a strong summer -- fueled by three billion-dollar sequels, "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides," "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 2" -- gave the business at least a fighting chance to pull even for the year.
Also read: Billion-Dollar Babies to Superhero Busts -- 5 Lessons of the Summer Box Office
That opportunity was squandered over Thanksgiving weekend, when the studios over-saturated multiplexes with family films, and only Disney's "Muppets" escaped with a decent opening.
Things could have gone seriously south over the Christmas holiday, too, when eight films opened wide within a span of only nine days. But the domestic market ended up 8 percent compared to the same four-day Christmas weekend in 2010.
There's also the foreign market, which has dwarfed the domestic box office this year for major releases including "Pirates" -- which grossed nearly 80 percent of its $1.04 billion worldwide take overseas.
In fact, foreign box-office totals could make everyone forget about the under-performance of the domestic market this year and even help the movie business beat its 2010 global theatrical revenue record of $31.8 billion.
With those broad trends in mind, here are some other things we learned about the box office in 2011:
FEMALE-DRIVEN COMEDY IS HOT
2011 will be remembered as a year in which a new sub-genre was invented -- the R-rated chick comedy.
Universal's "Bridesmaids" proved to be the big revelation -- a raunchy showcase for women comics that grossed $288.4 million worldwide on a $32.5
