The panic of last year’s box office downturn is over. 2006 saw a return to increasing ticket sales for Hollywood. Variety says the movie industry wrapped up 2006 with a big $9.13 billion in receipts, up from $8.3 billion last year. It’s a wonder they didn’t just give up and shut the whole thing down after only making $8 billion, isn’t it?

The interesting thing is that the increase came courtesy not of big blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean, but from mid-level movies which did better than anyone expected. It was movies like The Devil Wears Prada, The Break-Up, and Borat which drove the increase. Though Pirates broke almost every record in sight over the summer, other massive moneymakers were few and far between. Cars did well, Casino Royale made a lot of money, but nothing close to Pirates. There were no Shrek 2’s to Pirates’s Spider-Man this year.

Maybe that’s for the best. Bloated blockbusters like the ones we saw in 2004 raised expectations beyond all reason. In 2004 the industry made $9.21 billion, mostly off movies like Spider-Man 3 and Shrek 2. This year they nearly equaled that total, but by spreading audiences out over a lot of solid, mid-level movies.

The studio executives with the most cash in their wallets this January are the ones over at Sony. The Playstation 3 may be a disaster, but their movie division made more money than any other in 2006. They didn’t have the biggest movies of the year, second place Disney had those in Pirates 2 and Cars, but they had a lot of the next biggest movies in Casino Royale, Talladega Nights, and The Da Vinci Code. Sony sold $1.69 billion in tickets.

Newsflash! Movies are here to stay. They’re crazy profitable. Hollywood isn’t likely to collapse any time soon.