According to The Hollywood Reporter, film studios have posted record earnings for calendar year 2008. Around 1.36 billion cinema tickets were sold in the United States during 2008, compared to 1.4 billion tickets in 2007. Ticket prices rose an average of 4.7 per cent, resulting in a 2 per cent increase in overall net profits. Ars Technica has the details:

Despite the MPAA’s continuing battle against film pirates and even a French group’s warning that piracy could kill the industry, domestic box offices are doing better than ever. Both blockbusters and not-so-blockbusters propelled record-setting revenues to an estimated $9.78 billion in 2008, with ticket price increases and films from Warner Bros, Paramount, and Sony drawing captivated audiences. …

Warner Bros. topped the list of successful studios this year with The Dark Knight, which collected $531 million and became the second highest-grossing theatrical release in history. … Knocked from its first place throne in 2007 to second place this year was Paramount, grossing $1.6 billion and garnering a 16.4 percent market share. The summer release of Iron Man was Paramount’s most successful for the year, collecting $318.3 million. … Sony took third place among studios, bringing in $1.28 billion and claiming a 13.1 percent market share. Hancock was Sony’s leading star with $228 million at the box office.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has previously claimed in studies that studios face a $6.1 billion annual loss to piracy (nearly two-thirds of overall profits), and that this would ‘shortly’ manifest itself in reduced profits. Given record profits and no material drop in attendance, it seems difficult to take seriously the industry’s claims that it is being decimated by film piracy. In the United States, at least, rhetoric about the impact of piracy on studios’ profits remains unsupported by empirical evidence.