What’s the percentage of first weekend box office that goes to the theater, and how does that percentage change over time? What’s the cost of advertising a movie, and is that cost included in the budget number against which you’re judging the film’s box office? How much, exactly, is the bump that 3D films get? And how much do matinees or luxury experiences like Gold Star Cinema weigh on the weekend box office? What the fuck does the weekend box office even mean, exactly?

I’m not talking about my usual whining about box office – ie, who cares about numbers if the movies are good – but rather a much deeper, more existential question that nobody seems able to answer. There are some who like to reduce the movie business to just business, and they approach the box office from a very standard business model. They think that the box office numbers have some direct correlation with what happens in Hollywood, which just isn’t the case. If that was the case, there would be no Tron Legacy this Christmas. The original film didn’t just do poorly, it flat out tanked, and it isn’t like Tron has become some sort of endless Disney cash machine. The same goes for GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra; looking at the domestic take for that film it’s baffling that a sequel would be greenlit, and yet there’s a script in development.

And look at it from the other point of view – the correlation between box office success and the movie business isn’t as cut and dried as we all like to believe. Titanic‘s big impact was probably allowing movies to be longer, which isn’t exactly the kind of massive footprint you’d expect from the biggest movie of all time. And what’s been the fallout from Avatar? Where’s that slew of hard scifi movies we all thought would come from the movie? They’re not making it out of development hell, near as I can tell. The biggest impact I can see from Avatar is that Warner Bros allowed Green Lantern to get fairly cosmic, changing a pretty down to Earth script into something more interesting.


Of course Hollywood is a big old boat, so turning it takes time; maybe we’ll really see the impact of Avatar next year. But I suspect that the lessons Hollywood learns from the box office aren’t the ones that we think they learn, and that’s just another way that we, the spectators, simply don’t understand the box office. 


So we have a method of measuring the success of movies that’s seemingly arbitrary – I bet that the cost of going to the movies fluctuates 5 bucks depending on where you live – that is impossible to track over time – inflation and rising ticket prices make any comparison of this year’s box office to the box office of a decade ago hopeless – and that is now being fattened up with false padding – I understand that Toy Story 3‘s huge haul is impressive… but if Shrek 2 had the 3D bump it would still have outgrossed the latest Pixar. It’s a dumb method, a flawed method, and one that doesn’t actually tell us much of anything about the performance of a movie.


The Europeans do it better. The standard for measuring European box office remains what it once was in the United States – admissions. They count how many tickets are sold to a movie, which is a number that isn’t prey to the whims of local pricing, 3D bumps or inflation. I know that as Americans we’re obsessed with dollar signs, but those dollars we fixate on at the box office serve only to obfuscate the reality of movie performance. When you hear that European cinema grossed 6.27 billion Euros in 2009, that feels like a big number but an abstract one. When I then tell you that there were 981 million tickets sold, that feels pretty damn big too, but like something around which I can wrap my mind. I get what that means. 

I’ll never believe that there’s any point in getting hung up on the box office; Hollywood business is alchemy and magic, and as much of it is about appearances as it is about cold hard numbers. Superman Returns got to 200 million dollars, but that’s a number that Warner Bros got by the sweat of their balls, not by actual humans being interested in the movie. But we’ll always look back at that number as meaning something, even though it doesn’t. I don’t know that the admissions numbers for Superman Returns tells us a more honest story about the movie’s reception, but it feels more solid. 
We don’t talk about how much money a book has made, or how many dollars a record has earned. We talk about units shifted, and with good reason, because units shifted is the most concrete way to understand popularity. Let an accountant worry about gross versus net; if we’re going to be (ill-advisedly) interested in the box office at all, it should be an interest in numbers that matter, that say something and that have a real weight. The weight of asses in seats.
Thanks to Colin Geddes for sparking the idea for this Advocate.