Film Trivia | 100 did you know facts & trivia about Films [Part 5]

The success of any specific film is based upon its box office. But, what, exactly, is the box office and how it got its name?

We have, already, talked about film’s history, terms and the different genres. So, now, its time to dive into some unknown things about box office.

A box office or ticket office is a place where tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event
Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a wicket
By extension, the term is frequently used, especially in the context of the film industry, as a synonym for the amount of business a particular production, such as a film or theatre show, receives
Box office business can be measured in the terms of the number of tickets sold or the amount of money raised by ticket sales
It is also called revenue
The projection and analysis of these earnings is very important for the creative industries
Box office is often a source of interest for fans
This is predominant in the Hollywood movie industry
The term is attested since 1786
It stems presumably from sales of boxes
These were private seating areas in a theater
The sense of “total sales” is attested from 1904
A folk etymology is that this derives from Elizabethan theatre, where theater admission was collected in a box attached to a long stick, passed around the audience
This is comparable to “bottle” in Punch and Judy, where money was collected in a bottle
However, first attestation is about 200 years later, making this highly unlikely
There are numerous websites that monitor box-office receipts
Some of the better known are BoxOffice, Box Office India, A Box Office, Box Office Mojo, Koimoi, ShowBIZ Data, The Numbers
These sites provide box office information for hundreds of movies
Data for older movies is often incomplete due to the way box office reporting evolved
One other factor for this is the availability of information prior to the introduction of the internet
This is especially true for the old Hollywood films
Variety started reporting box office results by theatre on March 3, 1922
This started happening to give exhibitors around the country information on a film’s performance on Broadway, which was often where first run showings of a film were held
In addition to New York City, they also endeavoured to include all of the key cities in the U.S. in future
Initially, they also reported results for 10 other cities including Chicago and Los Angeles
In 1929, the first issue of The Motion Picture Almanac was released
This list included a list of the top 104 grossing films for the past year
In 1932, Variety published the studios’ top grossing films of the year
Variety has maintained this tradition annually since
In 1937, BoxOffice magazine began publishing box office reports
Beginning in the 1930s, BoxOffice magazine published a Barometer issue in January
This Barometer reported the performance of movies for the year expressed as percentages
In 1946, Variety started to publish a weekly National Box Office survey on page 3
This survey indicated the performance of the week’s hits and flops based on the box office results of 25 key U.S. cities
Later in 1946, Variety published a list of All-Time Top Grossers with a list of films that had achieved or gave promise of earning $4,000,000 or more in domestic (U.S. and Canada) rentals
This became a leading source of data for a film’s performance
Variety would publish an updated all-time list annually for over 50 years
This happens normally in their anniversary edition each January
The anniversary edition would also normally contain the list of the top performing films of the year
In the late 1960s, Variety used an IBM 360 computer to collate the grosses from their weekly reports of 22 to 24 U.S. cities from January 1, 1968
The data came from up to 800 theatres
This represented around 5% of the U.S. cinema population at the time
And it was around one-third of the total U.S. box office grosses
In 1969, Variety started to publish a list of the top 50 grossing films each week
“The Love Bug” was the number one on the first chart published for the week ending April 16, 1969
The chart was discontinued in 1990
In 1976, Marcy Polier, an employee of the Mann theater chain, set up Centralized Grosses to collate U.S. daily box office data on a centralized basis rather than each theater chain collating their own numbers from other theater chains
The company later became National Gross Service then Entertainment Data, Inc. (EDI)
Except for disclosures by the studios on very successful films, total domestic (U.S. and Canada) box office gross information for films was not readily available until National Gross Service started to collate this data around 1981
The collation of grosses led to wider reporting of domestic box office grosses for films
Arthur D. Murphy at Variety was one of the first to organize and chart that information and report it in a meaningful form
During the 1980s, Daily Variety started to publish a weekly chart of the domestic box office grosses of films
Gradually the focus of a film’s performance became its box office gross rather than the rentals
Prior to the tracking of these grosses, domestic or worldwide box office grosses is not available for many earlier films
In 1984, EDI started to report Canadian grosses as well and by 1985 was reporting data for 15,000 screens
In 1987, EDI set up a database of box office information which included data on certain films back to 1970
By 1991, all U.S. studios had agreed to share their complete data reports with EDI
In 1990, EDI opened an office in the UK
They moved into Germany in 1993
And Spain in 1995 reporting
In 1994, Variety published their first annual global box office chart showing the top 100 grossing films internationally for the prior year
EDI were acquired by ACNielsen Corporation in 1997 for $26 million
Then, it became Nielsen EDI
In December 2009, with its acquisition of Nielsen EDI for $15 million, measurement company Rentrak became the sole provider of worldwide box office ticket sales revenue and attendance information which is used by many of the websites noted above
Films that are considered to have been very unsuccessful at the box office are called box office bombs or box office flops
To determine if a movie made a profit, it is not correct to directly compare the box office gross with the production budget
This is because the movie theater keeps nearly half of the gross on average
The split varies from movie to movie
The percentage for the distributor is generally higher in early weeks
Usually the distributor gets a percentage of the revenue after first deducting a “house allowance” or “house nut”
It is also common that the distributor gets either a percentage of the gross revenue, or a higher percentage of the revenue after deducting the nut, whichever is larger
The distributor’s share of the box office gross is often referred to as the “distributor rentals”, especially for box office reporting of older films
For films released in North America, box office figures are usually divided between domestic and foreign
Domestic is for US and Canada
Foreign includes all other countries
Weekly box office figures are taken to be from Friday through Thursday
This is to allow for the fact that most films are released on a Friday
A large component of this is the weekend box office, defined as the box office receipts from Friday through Sunday
In particular, the weekend box office for the initial week of release, or opening weekend, is often widely reported
Theaters is the number of theaters in which the movie is showing
Since a single theater may show a movie on multiple screens, the total number of screens is used as another measure
The theaters measure is used to determine whether a film is in wide release or limited release
Wide release means at least 600 theaters
Limited release is less than 600 theaters
Occasionally, a film may achieve wide release after an initial limited release
Many films that vie for awards consideration usually use a slow roll-out
This is called a platform release
Gross refers to gross earnings
On average, the movie’s distributor receives a little more than half of the final gross
This is often referred to as the rentals
The remainder is going to the exhibitor
Multiple is the ratio of a film’s total gross to that of the opening weekend
A film that earns $20 million on its opening weekend and finishes with $80 million has a multiple of 4
From 2004 to 2014, films viewers graded as A+ on CinemaScore had a 4.8 multiple
While films graded as F had a 2.2 multipl
Other measures for box office success are audiences breakdowns
The highest-grossing film as of right now (in anadjusted for inflation grosses) is Avengers: Endgame
In adjusted for inflation grosses is Gone With The Wind
Studios are taken more into consideration the unadjusted grosses
Films which are initially viewed as “flops” may recover income elsewhere (rentals, streaming, etc.)