One little-appreciated outgrowth of pandemic-related “the new normal” is that reporting boxoffice grosses immediately and publicly has become irregular. For about a quarter century previously, industry allowed cinema ticket sales revenue to be publicly announced quickly, though it’s little remembered that previously those figures were confidential (explained further down).
“As Moviegoing Returns, Will Hollywood Studios Continue to Hide Box Office Grosses?” says the headline of an excellent Variety story by Rebecca Rubin that raises this specter. What’s happened is that, with cinema depressed during the Covid-19 restrictions, there’s a growing tendency for Hollywood film distributors to keep quiet about box office results for their movies. The reason that is Covid-era results usually pale in comparison to normal times.
“For indie studios, box office reporting has been mixed,” says the Variety article. “Companies including IFC Films, 101 Studios, and Solstice Studios, have remained transparent. However, Searchlight Pictures, which is owned by Disney, wasn’t originally forthcoming with revenues for Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-frontrunner ‘Nomadland,’ which played in more than 1,100 theaters. Likewise, indie distributor A24 was quiet with opening weekend ticket sales for Lee Isaac Chung’s drama ‘Minari,’ another Academy Award hopeful. And Neon didn’t share figures for ‘Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry,’ a documentary about the pop star that debuted simultaneously on Apple TV Plus.”
On the Hollywood industry going quiet recently, Warner Bros. Pictures was opaque on reporting mediocre box office for “Tenet,” the offbeat sci-fi film that premiered Sept. 3 domestically. Warner Bros. should get credit for trying to support cinema by releasing PG-13-rated “Tenet,” which finished with a domestic (U.S. and Canada) cinema gross of $58.4 million; but that’s weak since a total in the hundreds of millions of BO dollars could be expected in normal times. International BO was a healthier $305.2 million for “Tenet,” as overseas theaters were less impacted by the pandemic at that point.
The Variety article continues: “Other major studios, such as Universal Pictures and its specialty label Focus Features, as well as Disney, have continued to document numbers in a traditional manner during the pandemic,” writes Rubin in Variety. “Paramount Pictures hasn’t released any movies in a standard theatrical fashion in the past 12 months, but the company plans to report grosses for ‘A Quiet Place Part II’ on May 28.”
It remains to be seen if Hollywood film distributors return to the practice of full and prompt disclosure of box office data. It’s worth noting that they’d probably only be able to delay circulation of box office news, at best. That’s because today’s four biggest theater circuits are all publicly traded and must make disclosures for investors. Those big-four Wall Street-listed theater chains are Regal Cinemas (part of UK-based Cineworld), AMC Theatres, Cinemark USA and Canada’s Cineplex as well as some smaller circuits.
Since the middle 1990s, the industry has allowed complete box office summary data to be announced publicly, much like the Nielsen ratings for TV shows. “So in a sense, box office figures are a blessing and a curse” for Hollywood, observes Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore and movie-industry veteran.
When a film does well at the box office, industry shouts the blessed news, since it’s human nature for the public to latch on to hits. Bad box office has the opposite effect, as the consumers figure low-grossing movies are probably snoozers.
“A film that ranks number one in national box office one week can be marketed as ‘America’s most popular movie’ for the next seven days,” says the business/academic book “Marketing to Moviegoers: Third Edition”. “If a comedy ranks third behind a kids’ film and a fantasy drama in the closely-watched weekend box office, then it can be advertised as ‘America’s number-one comedy!’ as was the case for MGM’s 2010 box office dud ‘Hot Tub Time Machine.’”
Another factor in less public reporting is the video streamers often put the kibosh on reporting box office for their original films limited releases in theaters. Reasons aren’t clearly stated but it’s probably because box office isn’t particularly impressive for truncated showings.
From the birth of cinema into the 1980s, there was no official national box office publicly announced, though trade papers published spotty figures. Information became known on an ad hoc and mostly localized basis such as a specific theater revealing that it set a record for box office or a film distributor achieved a company record for a given title.
Over the years, Hollywood trade newspapers compiling figures for some key cities, which would identify the winners and losers on a systematic basis, and provided some historical comparisons. At the core, those key cities were New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
By the early 1990s, overall box office was announced with the blessing of industry. A catalyst was a compiling service with the bland name Entertainment Data Inc., and known by pronouncing each letter of its acronym name. EDI assembled figures that were sold to industry providing industry aggregate and granular data; each distributor no longer had to compile its own list by trading figures with competing distributors and theaters to get a full picture of industry ticket revenues.
EDI’s history illustrates how box office reporting was a backwater within living memory. The box office data service was founded in 1976 by Marcy Polier, who worked as an office secretary at film distributor. She realized that Hollywood needed to replace a longstanding practice of companies laboriously calling each other to share figures, meaning film companies assembled their own industry box office stats in endless duplication. Polier eventually hired her boss to work for her at EDI (very amicably!) and then sold the data company for $26 million; that’s a startling price tag given it simply pulled together not-so-secret information (the successor to EDI is Comscore).
Former Warner Bros. Pictures distribution executive Howard Welinsky recalls that EDI “complied the raw numbers and each studio released them. EDI/Comscore collected the studio numbers from the studios and provided some press,” but it was the studio distributors deciding to go public with summary figures.
Further, though the perception is in recent years box office figures were a complete census, actually some smaller theaters didn’t report but were represented with estimates. “During last 20 years or so at 6 am a staff person would estimate the missing and publish an internal document that went to a couple hundred filmmakers agents, etc. on a daily basis 365 days a year,” says Welinsky. “Final numbers would be released Mondays around 11-11:30.”
“Marketing to Moviegoers” estimates that non-reporting theaters—generally small and not part of a national chain–dwindled to 5% of movie box office in recent years, down from 15% as recently as 2006. Their box office had to be estimated and added up with actuals from big theaters with solid numbers. “When the non-computerized estimate was more than 15 percent, distributors would occasionally boost or inflate figures to try to beat a competitive film or meet a box-office forecast,” says the book. “But with 95 percent of box office from hard numbers, flagrant fudging of box office figures is no longer possible.”
What was it like to run the numbers in that pre-disclosure era? Your author turns to his wife for an authoritative explanation because she assembled and wrote Los Angeles box office stories for Variety in the 1980s.
When serving as assistant west coast editor for Variety, Marie Silverman Marich recalls that she’d receive a 5-inch stack of paper with raw weekend box office figures on Sundays and Mondays that was the basis of L.A. Box Office stories covering weekends. That blizzard of paper detailed every play date for over 100 theaters within 50 miles of Los Angeles.
“It was the type of job where you’d use a ruler to go down the sheets of paper to keep the endless rows of numbers straight,” Marie recalls. “It was very time consuming and very manual. For whoever did ‘LA Box Office,’ that was their job two full days a week.” The task involved adding ticket sales from every showing of each movie of interest from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to “Full Metal Jacket” to “Risky Business” that certified Tom Cruise’s star power.
Variety’s ticket-sales guru in this era was the late Art Murphy, who pioneered modern box office reporting, and was a recognized resource for cinema figures and insights. In those days, the Variety office relied on manual typewriters, analog adding machines with paper ribbons and carbon paper (that were surrounded by ash trays overflowing with cigarette butts!). Many people thought Murphy simply stored all the numbers in his head.
Getting personal again, your author can recall another example of how cinema box office was unobtainable on a rapid and comprehensive basis just a few decades ago. While the author was a media reporter at Investor’s Business Daily in the mid-1980s, the newspaper began publishing Friday-through-Sunday national box office for holiday peak weekend in its printed Tuesday edition.
Receiving weekend box office figures early Tuesday morning as recently as the mid 1980s was a revelation for Wall Street analysts in New York who previously had to piece together anecdotal information. Surprisingly, well-heeled financial executives would comb trade newspapers for snippets of information and rely on personal Hollywood contacts, or otherwise wait days for print trade publications to arrive at their offices. Electronic information transmission was in its infancy.
This early publication of box office in the 1980s by Investor’s Business Daily provided such tidbits as Paramount Pictures landed a surprise hit with inexpensive Australian pickup “Crocodile Dundee” — which grossed a then-astronomical $174.8 million domestically to rank second for the year. Box office information for movies of indie film company Carolco Pictures (the Rambo movies, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Basic Instinct”) was particularly prized in this era; Carolco’s share price was dependent on its film performance since it was a medium-sized company.
Those early no-announced national box office days seem a million years ago, but are within memory. And those outside the small circle of cinemas and distributors may find the era of underground box office data may return in some fashion.
I don’t believe anyone in the whole industry ever thought anyone ever told the truth.
-a Variety reporter
The History of Box Office Reporting As Seen Through Variety
The book “Inside Variety” by Peter Besas recounts how news coverage of box office “remained spotty and unsystematic” for most of the prior century. Only in the past 25 years has complete film performance summaries been made public. The book chronicles the evolution as experienced by the Hollywood trade newspaper.
“As early as the 1920s Variety was regularly sending a reporter to the office of Sam Katz, head of the Publix theater circuit, then the largest in the country, who provided Variety with a list of film grosses in New York and other major cities,” says “Inside Variety.”
The spotty, ad hoc coverage was consolidated in the 1940s and systemized as the movie business grew in sophistication. Local box office for 24 cities became regular news in the pages of Variety, with more context and historical comparisons.
Along the way, the “Inside Variety” book says film distributors tried to hype results to make their films look better while theaters downplayed, hoping wiggle out of paying fair rentals to film distributors. “I don’t believe anyone in the whole industry ever thought anyone ever told the truth,” recalled Variety journalist Larry Michie of compiling box office.
By 1969, Variety established enough consistency to introduce a “top 50 films” chart — a favorite of readers because the information was vital and previously unavailable. Variety journalists did their best to cross-check stats with sources, so figures were believed to be generally accurate though not precise. In these early days, compiling cinema ticket revenue stats involved more than simply accepting figures provided by industry.
In 1976, box office compiler Entertainment Data Inc. began confidentially compiling and archiving data, gradually providing the press with more and more top-line figures, meaning a summary. By the 1990s, EDI figures on top-line revenue for each film were made public enabling the press and public accurate information on a daily basis. The wealth of granular data underneath the summary is purchased by industry, and is not for mass public consumption.
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