Massive budgets. Internet piracy. Short attention spans. Hollywood has all manner of excuses to explain why box office returns aren’t what they could be. The one thing studio execs don’t talk about is how their own need for greed is affecting the bottom line.

As the summer movie season draws to a close, The Dark Knight is in the running to be the highest grossing movie of all time. Five other films this year have raked in more than $200 million, which is an impressive stat, until you consider that ticket prices are higher than ever — as are the budgets for these films. Part of what is eating into the grosses is the home video turnaround. Two of the summer’s biggest hits, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, opened in May and have been given late-September DVD release dates. With movies hitting home video mere weeks after a film finishes its theatrical run (or, in some markets, even before it is out of circulation), the notion of a movie being an event is quickly slipping away.

Aging geeks can remember waiting what seemed like an eternity for The Empire Strikes Back to come out on video. It was released theatrically in the summer of 1980, and it took till Christmas 1982 to hit home video. That was an event, no matter how old you were, and if you knew you were going to have to wait that long to see the movie again, you would probably hit the theatre one last time.

Granted, times have chanced. Studios are battling an online piracy war, and the solution seems to be a swift home video release to help recoup their money as quickly as possible. In some cases, this makes for a laughably quick turnaround. When Surviving Christmas bombed at box offices during Thanksgiving 2004, the Ben Affleck vehicle was rushed to DVD prior to Christmas the same year. Some movies move even faster. When Steven Soderbergh made the low-budget Bubble in 2005, the shot-on-video feature was released in theatres, on cable and DVD on the same day. To be fair, that was more of a publicity tool than anything else, but it does speak to the trends that Hollywood is embracing when it comes to DVD.

The truth is, when studios rush a film to video stores, they devalue the movie-going experience. What incentive is there to see a film in theatres when you can own the film a few weeks down the line? However, one-time viewers aren’t the whole story when it comes to box office mojo. When the term “blockbuster” was coined back in the summer of 1975 to put a label on the runaway success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, it was widely recognized that the hundreds of millions of dollars of profit came from audiences who returned to the theatre to see the film again and again. The same thing happened with Star Wars (1977) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). With the home video market moving as fast as it is, fewer filmgoers are going back for second and third hits.

Would box office grosses increase if DVD release dates were held back? It’s tough to say. Hollywood would argue that the longer they wait to bring a film home, the more likely piracy is to eat into DVD revenues. I’d argue that most people that are downloading movies probably weren’t going to buy them anyway. At that point the question stops being why aren’t these movies making more money, it’s why doesn’t Hollywood make better movies — but that’s another issue altogether.