Let’s flash back to the last big Superman movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in 2016. That opened to $US166 million. Here’s where we step through the looking glass. Movie ticket prices back then were $US8.50. More maths, and we get … 20 million tickets sold on the opening weekend. In other words, the Superman franchise has lost about half its fan base. Holy Kryptonite, Batman! Hollywood’s biggest secret: despite all the incessant talk about box-office records, ticket sales have been heading south – for decades. Per capita movie-ticket sales were down by a third in the first 20 years of this century. (Australia’s admissions have declined similarly, from 92.5 million in 2001 to 55.4 million last year.) The pandemic made things much worse, of course, but the rebound hasn’t brought us back. Fewer ticket sales mean someone has to pay, and it’s coming out of the pockets of those among us who still go to see movies on the big screen. It feels a lot like being mugged. My wife and I went to the swanky Hoyts in Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter to see F1: The Movie the other night. Tickets for the “Xtreme Screen” showing were about $30 – and as I checked out online I saw that Hoyts had added a $5.10 “booking fee” to the order. (That extra 10 cents was a nice touch.)