“Crowdsourcing” is probably not a bad way to put it. I can recall a couple of movies that had a strong opening weekend - and a dismal second weekend, as word of mouth got out that this was a major turkey. This is especially helpful when the studio didn’t allow critics an early look - always a bad sign.
I do not know why I am so interested. A little bit of what everyone is saying here. I look daily at the figures on box office mojo. I am most interested in the box office bombs and why it happens.
John Carter and the Jack and Giant Slayer movie - I thought were good movies.
Peter Pan from 2003 was great - buy the DVD for your kids.
Every box office bomb has an interesting story about why and how it bombed.
The stories in the news about Titanic before it was released were fascinating. There were many stories about how it was so expensive to make and would end up being the biggest box office bomb of all time.
I don’t pay particular attention to them, but I will occasionally look at specific films and what they’ve made.
For example, some people keep claiming Pacific Rim was a flop. Yet it has taken in over $400 million worldwide. That’s a pretty successful film in anyone’s book.
I hate how they list box office receipts instead of number of butts in the seats of the theaters. It really tells me nothing that a movie broke box office records because of ticket price inflation. If sports teams provide attendance figures, then so can movies.
I don’t just like movies, I like the business of making and producing movies, so the business(financial) side of it interests me too. I don’t care a ton, but I do care and read about it.
Ticket price inflation, and 3D.
Don’t forget the increase of theaters with multiplexes, too. More tickets to buy.
For instance, here’s something I learned here on SDMB that totally astounded me.
Remember all the hype and publicity around “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace”? All the people waiting in lines overnight to see it? Not LA or NY, but even in small places like Lincoln, Nebraska, where I lived at the time. Famously not a perfect movie, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say every theater was booked on opening day.
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2” nearly tripled that!
I’d rather see that figure, too, but whoever reports on sports attendance has the advantage of counting the number of people in one place, not people scattered across possibly thousands of theaters on multiple continents.
Personally, I’m interested in both finance and movies. Plus I just like numbers. And sometimes it’s surprising information. Surprising as in, “I can’t believe that movie did so well,” usually.
If a movie makes a lot of money, that is really the only objective measure we have of how “good” it is. Of course, just because a movie makes a lot of money doesn’t mean that every single person will enjoy it, or consider it one of the best, but it is a quantifiable measure of success. I think that is the driving reason for why box office grosses are so obsessed over. It gives fans an objective justification/reassurance that their favorite movie really is a “great” one, because it made boatloads of money.