In a Distressed Year, Hollywood Smiles

This was the year that Hollywood hit the jackpot by informing us that Mike Tyson keeps a pet tiger, Spock had a fling with Uhura, Hogwarts School needs a new head, the world will end in 2012, and even George Clooney is up in the air when it comes to women. By year’s end, it was enough to make Daniel Day-Lewis break into song. Hollywood will ride premium-price tickets for 3-D movies, big-budget sequels and — counterintuitively — the recession to more than $10 billion in ticket sales by the end of 2009, a near-record that is helping to offset a steep drop in DVD revenue.