So, my question is, why the heck are we rating how successful/popular a movie is based on the dollar gross of the theaters? Obviously this weights favorably to recent movies, since they cost $10/ticket today vs. whatever lower price they used to be.
Wouldn’t it be a little more revealing if they used a system like TV? You know, maybe total number of tickets sold, and percentage of the tickets sold for all movies that weekend?
Is there something about the movie industry that makes the dollar gross a more valid measure of popularity or success?
I’d imagine it’s because using dollar values allows people to compare income with expenditure – how much it cost to make, how much it cost to market, how much the actors/actresses were paid, etc.
I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that major studies have little motivation to develop a more revealing or accurate system. Their bean-counters and number-crunchers are kept busy enough making sure that no movie ever makes a profit.
Top grossing figures are simply a tactic to put butts into seats, period.
The TV-type ratings you mention have just the opposite historical skew. Since there are so many more TV stations (with cable and all) the percentage-based ratings for the networks will never again reach what they were a few decades ago.
I would think that the same skew would exist in the motion picture industry with all of the multiplex theaters out there.
Also the time a movie is released would play into this type of rating as well. The summer blockbuster season tends to have a few huge release dates were a movie may out gross anything from, say, early spring but only be fourth or fifth in box office revenue for the week.
The movies studios have ZERO incentive to switch to a more accurate system. Using figures that aren’t adjusted for inflation allows them to break records constantly, and breaking records is good for business and gets written up as “news”.
There is a more accurate system. It’s called “adjusted for inflation” but the method of adjusting for inflation differs, so lists differ a little. Here is a site that has both adjusted and unadjusted lists, as well as decade by decade lists. Here is a site that uses a different formula.
Way back in the 80’s Entertainment Tonight started posting who was champs at the box office and for some reason the general public has become obsessed with it.
If the film dosen’t make 100 million dollars it must be a bomb.
Yeah right.
The trouble is that an apples to apples comparison of current films and historic films is difficult because films are realsed much differently today than 20 years ago.
Beverly Hills Cop was the first film released on 1000 screens at a time. Today 3000 is almost the norm for a wide summer release and 5000 screens is possible.
For some films in the past it would be hard to tell exactly how many people saw them because of poor bookkeeping. Nickleodeons were extremely popular and people just went to see what ever was there. Today people are slightly more picky.
Actually, probably the best weekly figure that reflects this is the Per Screen Average, since this helps compare successful but small, limited distribution films with their mammoth competitors, and this figure will often be the barometer by which a studio will gauge whether it is smart to open the film on additional screens if it is doing extremely well in a few cities. Entertainment Weekly’s box office chart includes this figure.
Here’s another site that lists All-time box office totals adjusted for inflation, although they all seem pretty close to each other. Remember, though, that this does not include the silent era, since reasonably accurate BO totals weren’t being compiled until the late 20s/early 30s.
Basically because the agencies reporting those figures are the studios that release the movies, and as other people on the thread have noted, they have a vested interest in promoting whatever history-making statistic they can come up with this week – biggest opening weekend ever, biggest August opening weekend ever, biggest August opening weekend for a comedy, third-best Julia Roberts-driven comedy August opening weekend ever.
Entertainment journalists (and there’s a term that’s all-too-often an oxymoron) want the story.
The people who are most interested in comparing info on how many pairs of eyeballs saw a particular movie (academics, for example) aren’t usually in a position to finance the infrastructure necessary to research and report that information.
It’s a bit depressing that people are as susceptible as ever when it comes to this kind of advertising, though. Why should I care if it’s the #1 movie in America if it’s a steaming pile of monkey dung?*
*Any resemblance to recent blockbusters is purely coincidental.
It seems (not that I should be surprised) that the methodology used is the one most expected to increase the revenues of those compiling the stats.
If anybody had a financial interest in knowing how these movies stacked up against their historical counterparts, I suppose those stats would be mighty damn accurate.
As one of the SDMB’s inveterate movie geeks, I’ll commend the previous posters for their information and insight. Indeed, the Powers That Be have no real interest in anything resembling objectively useful box-office data, for the reasons stated: it’s useless in marketing, it requires lots of explanation (inflation figures, etc.), and so on.
I’ll also add two points that haven’t really been mentioned.
First, there are a handful of countries that do, in fact, report box office by ticket rather than by total revenue. I don’t have my list handy, but from having read Variety recently, it seems to me that Finland was one of them. (I saw this in connection with the recent release of Pearl Harbor in Scandinavia.) The article made a point of observing that (if my memory is correct) Finnish box office data was extrapolated from “total admissions.”
Second, if you consider that modern blockbusters are part of a business instead of an art form, you realize that determining actual attendance for historical comparison is trivia more than anything. The studios pay a certain amount to make their movies, a cost which is always rising due to inflation and many other factors. Ticket prices are also rising, for similar complicated reasons. All the studios want to know is whether the current crop of movies will turn a profit, so they can stay in business. Beyond that, it’s irrelevant whether more actual individual tickets were sold for the opening weekend of Princess Diaries than the similar period of Freaky Friday or whatever. It’s interesting for movie buffs, because it’s a more accurate barometer of a movie’s popularity, but as far as the balance sheet goes it’s an asterisk at best.
Family oriented films get the short end of the stick due to the cheaper price of a childs ticket. (as well as films that appeal to old people) So a parent taking two kids to the movies (3 admissions) grosses the same as two adults going to see American Pie 2. Okay maybe they aren’t really adults but you get the idea.
And another thing that makes the whole exercise a load of tosh is the “opening weekend” emphasis. I don’t give a damn how many fools go to see something on the opening weekend, presumably largely on the basis of pre-publicity put about by the people trying to make money out of the exercise, and if you believe that crap then let me know, because boy do I have a deal for you, cash on the barrelhead thanks and in small bills please.
What I want to know is how many people go to about the 3rd or 4th weekend, when word of mouth about the film’s attributes (or lack thereof) has got around. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to get what I’m looking for…
Nah, they just don’t care to make a big deal about it. Our company gets eyeball information, along with average ticket price, snack-bar incidence and average ticket, ancillary revenues such as video games and all sorts of stuff when we evaluate an investment in the industry.
Pretty dry stuff actually, but the box office numbers would also seem pretty dry if they weren’t so hyped.
Sure you will. The box-office recaps I read nearly always state how many weeks of release a film has been in and what the percentage falloff in box office was from the previous weekend.
You have a point that the information is available if you look for it. But frankly I don’t think every web page (even if it is a page of yahoo) is mainstream press. I mean there is an incredible amount of information on the internet, but that does not make all of it “the type of stuff you hear about all the time” to quote the OP.
To me, it would be more useful and meaningful for the entertainment press to have the headline: “Blockbuster grosses $x billion on 6th Weekend” than a headline telling us about the opening weekend.
How about Entertainment Weekly? They’re about as mainstream as entertainment press gets, and they list weeks in release, per screen averages, etc. The same information is in their magazine, also.