Why do we use box office sales to determine a films popular success?

I agree that tickets sold is a better indicator of popularity. Of course, as far as the studios go, it all comes down to $$$$$$.

We could call it the arse chart (I’m kidding, I agree with you).

Because it’s all about money. I stopped watching awards shows, especially music ones when I realised people were just being rewarded for sales rather than making anything special.

Just like music tickets sold for movies isn’t necessarily an indicator of bums on seats either. There were stories about elite African Americans buying up tickets in support of The Woman King for example. And it still didn’t do well.

I agree.
However money is always interesting to talk about.

The Barbie movie cost about $100M to produce and is approaching $1.3B global box office. Pretty amazing, maybe some kind of record!

There would probably be a lot of gimmicks used to sell tickets such as: big discounts, give-aways to lure people in, and someone buying up tickets just to inflate the numbers. That being said, using total receipts has its flaws too. Some films are not widely released or get eclipsed by a blockbuster movie that gets all the attention.

I've never used box office sales for that. Not all good films actually do well in the theaters, and sometimes shitty films rake in lots of dough. You have to look at the film itself to determine if it's actually good or not.

Here's an indicator of really overwhelming success: Is your movie SO popular it adds new words to your language???

I say that because "Barbiecore" seems to be a word that appeared this summer.

Yeah. It's just the simplest and most impressive-sounding headline number for marketing purposes, and because of inflation it gives the impression that recent films routinely outperform older films.

In and of itself, total box office doesn't matter that much, because -- without reference to costs -- it tells us nothing about profit. A billion dollar movie would be more impressive if the production and promotion had cost $50m, as opposed to one that cost $350m. But they don't tend to lead with that.

In any case, the big studios routinely employ all manner of underhand accounting tricks to fudge both their costs and their incomes, so none of these figures are to be entirely trusted anyway.