Does the movie industry use dollar amounts rather than total-seats-filled to measure its successes because with inflation, its easier to depend on dollar numbers ever-increasing even while total-seats-filled may be/are falling… and Hollywood would rather not expose its vulnerability of dwindling sales to the public?
No. Because anyone the financial health of the industry matters to can easily adjust for inflation. And because the movie industry cares about making money, not about transmitting a message. It’s the dollars that matter, not the number of views.
This should probably be in Cafe Society. I’ll ask the mods to move it for you.
If I were to invest my money in making a movie, I could care less about how many seats were filled. My only concern would be how much money I was making!
Now if I was making some sort of political movie or a movie which has some sort of social agenda - or I was involved with the making of a government propaganda type movie, THEN I would be very interested in how many seats were taken.
Does the movie industry use how much money it spent to determine expenses? Yes. That’s why it uses money taken in to determine revenues.
And don’t forget that inflation cuts both ways. Costs to make movies inflate along with ticket prices.
The number of seats filled is a useless measure for success.
Even if you measure success by how many people have seen it, ‘theatre seats filled’ isn’t even a very good proxy for it, since it doesn’t measure how many people see it on DVD, streaming, or television. Or illegally downloaded, since in this case, whether it’s illegal doesn’t matter! (Though seats sold is the only portion that’s easily, accurately measured - you can see how many DVDs are sold, how many times it’s streamed, or what kinds of TV ratings it gets, and how many times it’s illegally downloaded through certain channels, but that’s only a vague approximation of the viewers.) (Arguably, too, in this case, a person seeing it multiple times in theatre is a negative - you already know you’ve got this guy, he’s just keeping someone else from getting the seat!)
But the business doesn’t use how many people see it as a measure of success. They use how much of a profit did it make. Because the business isn’t in it to get people to see it, they want people to see it so that they can make money. Get people into theatres, get people buying the DVD, convince TV stations that they’ll get ratings/subscribers if they show your movies. Doesn’t matter which of those gets them the money, so long as they get the money. The number of people who see it in a theatre is a part of that, but not the only, or even the biggest part. (And that guy who goes to see every showing? His money is as good as anyone else’s. He’s an undeniable positive, because he’s a steady stream of cash. Even better if he buys it on DVD, and on BluRay, and streams it often enough that Netflix will keep licensing it, and watches it on TV whenever it comes up, so that the stations will keep licencing it…)
It’s 100%* about the bucks. Not all seats go for the same price: children, student, senior, matinée discounts, etc. For a showing, does the studio care if they sell 50 $10 tickets or 100 $5 discount tickets as long as their share is the same? Nope. (The theater does since more people means more refreshment sales … maybe. Not all groups buy popcorn at the same rate. But the amount of popcorn and soda sold is not publicly reported in the first place, and impossible to breakdown by movie for a multiplex in the second place.)
- Another situation where seats matters a bit is for sellouts. But that happens only for a handful of movies for a short period of time. If a movie is that popular, people go see the less popular showings and multiplexes can sometimes add screens.
Seats used to matter more than they do now because theaters produced almost all the revenue for a movie, and often that was for just a short period of time. Even then the money was more important overall, just like for any business. Now seats hardly count because so much revenue comes from distribution of DVDs, broadcast, cable, and streaming forms of the movie. The studios love great opening box office returns, but that’s gravy on top of deals already made that are intended to produce profits in the long run. There’s a huge market in merchandise and other follow-on products also. Some movies are based on existing products such as comic books that then become part of a larger overall marketing strategy where the movie is just a small part of a larger business.
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Also 3D showings, which charge a premium.