Why do we use box office sales to determine a films popular success?
Why not just count the number of tickets sold? Your movie put this many butts in the seats, period. Seems much more logical.
shareTheres no difference between box office sales and bums on seats .
If you want to convert between the two just use the average ticket price.
Different story afterwards , with dvd sales , streaming rights etc etc
That doesn't line up. An average is just that, not an actual reflection of numbers sold.
shareMathematically it would line up , unless they use one of those stupid methods of calculating average , and it gets skewed because someone buys a ticket for $5m.
but aside from that your splitting hairs , it would work out pretty much the same .
10 people pay $9 , 10 people pay $10 , 10 people pay $11 - average £10
box office take $300
$300 / avg ticket ($10) = 30 seats
but that is my point, it's literally not accurate, it's an average. One that would probably be off considerably. They know how many tickets were sold, they could definitely provide a number.
share"They know how many tickets were sold"
Do they ?
I admit i dont know how this works but it seems unlikely warner bros are whoever are going to get exact numbers of that.
I'd have thought they give the movie to a cinema for a certain price/duration and take a cut.
(or just a flat rate based on expected sales)
The cinema will say "Hey we made $10,000 this weekend - heres your half"
whether thats 1x $10,000 ticket or 5000 $2 tickets - they (wb) probly wont know.
They get their cut per ticket, so they'd have to know exactly how many each theater sold. This was actually tallied by hand when I worked in a small town theater in the early 90s, but I would assume it's all digitally tracked now.
share