STID "tracking" for $85-90 million opening [U.S. box office]

Oh, my money is part of those numbers!

I snuck off yesterday and caught an afternoon screening. About 25 people total in a 1:40pm showing.

 

Yeah, I agree completely. There is no way to make apple-to-apple comparisons of movies from different eras, way too many variables. The best we can do is to say that both STID & TWOK were hit movies in the years they were released (e.g. in the top 10 movies of the year), but any direct comparison of boxoffice numbers (adjusted or not) is not that meaningful.

Would Gone With the Wind make $1.6 billion domestically if it was released today? It wouldn't even come close. But it made a lot of money when it was released, which was at a time that not only it didn't have too much movie competition or any home video competition, it didn't have any TV competition at all. Also as you say the taste of the moviegoers from different generations will not be the same.

 

The studios don't like it all. Who can blame them? If you look at adjusted grosses, you would think no one has made a legitimate blockbuster since Gone With The Wind.

 

They are all BS, actually. Non-adjusted, adjusted, attendance. But it's hard for people today to get a grasp of how much money a movie made in 1937 if they don't have a solid appreciation of how much dollars were worth back then, hence the adjustment.

I think it's at least an interesting approximation. Personally I'd prefer attendance (# of tickets sold).

 

# of tickets doesn't work. The price of a movie in the 30s through the 50s was a nickel.

 

So ? A nickel was much more expensive than now.

I want to know how many times it was seen in theatres. I realise it's not a perfect metric, and adjusted gross is the next best thing... and is itself not perfect. As Buzzkill and I both said, there's no way to really compare them, in addition to the fact that audiences and culture were different back then.

 

Yeah, but my opinion is that nothing really works so we ought to give that shit up.

 

Well, if we give that shit up, and if any measure we have to apply is apples-to-oranges, then we can't use any measure to defend a claim about what's the most successful film in history. Certainly, biggest nominal gross to date doesn't mean most successful in history.

I don't think we should give anything up. That's just throwing in the towel. Certainly, the more measures one considers, the more complete a picture one has, although some measures obviously don't bring very much to the table. However, whether considering them is bullshit really depends on what conclusion one is trying to infer, or what claim one is trying to make.

That's actually even less meaningful than it sounds, because you'd have to imagine a world in which it had never existed at all until now, which is pretty much impossible.

However, if the domestic box office of GWTW were hypothetically invested in inflation-indexed bonds and managed appropriately, then one could have something like $1.6 billion dollars today. That actually sounds well on the way to being a meaningful statement, to me, pending actual numbers.

 

How would number of tickets sold not be the best way to measure the popularity of movies during their theatrical runs?

 

Because The Motion Picture, for example, seems to be wildly unpopular with people even though it has been the most successful Trek film at the box office.

 

It's not about how many tickets are sold, since that would decrease every year. Studios only release data on how much money movie a movie makes since that tends to stay the same or increase every year.

 

Yeah but if you just wanna know how many people went to see a movie and compare it with a movie from a different time frame tickets sold would be the best metrik.

I mean, albums sales have dramatically decreased but they still report it

I think if you're comparing the success of different films, ticket price is kind of irrelevant. A movie does business by people buying a ticket and going to see it. If that cost more or less over time doesn't matter, its the number of people who went that counts.

 

Some issues:

- Ten tickets sold in a population of ten people is great. Everybody experiences the film; perhaps it's very popular. Only fifty people showing up to watch another film in a population of a thousand, maybe not as great. Do you consider the second film five times as popular as the first, or only five percent as popular, or what? Larger markets support pieces of more marginal interest, that aren't necessarily popular overall.

- If a theater only seats 100, and shows sell out, that's good. Indications are that the movie showing there is popular, and very possibly more could have been seated. If a theater seats 1000 in a large market, but only 100 buy tickets, that's not as good. Both count the same number of tickets sold, but there's likely a different thing going on in terms of popular interest.

- A movie that has only a limited release or limited showtimes can't rack up very many tickets no matter what. Maybe if people saw it, they'd like it. But if they don't have the opportunity to decide whether or not to see it, how can you really say it's unpopular?

 

How is that relevant, considering the question you were answering ?

Yeah but nation- or worldwide would average that out.

I think ticket # has the advantage of showing how many people saw it, while gross allows us to get at least a vague idea of profit. Adjusted is just a way to compare movies across time. None of those is very useful, just interesting.

 

Apparently F/X channel have purchased the TV rights for Into Darkness, but I cant find any information regarding the price.

 

So what would be a useful formula to determine the movie success index factoring in average ticket price, population percentage, total profit, adjusted inflation, number of screens/seats.

After you do that you measure the index of every competing movie at the time and calculate how that impacted the movie.

Would that be sufficient to determine if it was a success?

 

Attendance numbers are also not something that can be used to make a fair comparison of the movies from different eras, basically not much different that the inflation adjusted box office numbers.

The inflation adjusted boxoffice numbers are not based on the general inflation or dollar value, they are based on ticket price inflation and estimated attendance. They multiply the attendance number by the latest average ticket price (currently at $7.94) to get the inflation adjusted boxoffice. If there are no attendance numbers available then they create one based on average ticket price of the year the movie was released.

For example the average ticket price in 1982 was $2.94, TWOK boxoffice was $78.9M, resulting an estimated attendance of 26.8 million. Multiplying that by the 2013 average ticket price of $7.94 creates the inflation adjusted boxoffice number of $213.1.

 

Population is a lot bigger nowadays, so more available eyes. Entertainment choices are more vast now. Back then, if you wanted to see a movie, seeing it at the theater was the only choice. More competition now.

The most meaningful metric would be probably be to compare and tabulate the numbers for the movies in a specified year (Attendance, box office take, profit) and see what percentages of the total your specific movie that you want to compare to accomplished. Then do the same thing with the other movie you want to compare

GWTW made $100
GWTW sold 100 tickets
Total Box office for year was $1000
Total tickets sold in the year was 1000
GWTW took 10% of Total Box Office
GWTW sold 10% of the tickets sold that year
Do the same with profit
Then do the same for the movie you are comparing it to, and see how they measure up

Even this has it's problems, but, it's closer, IMHO

 

Im thinking the sheer number of spectacles this summer (and World War Z is a spectacle, and teen/20s reaction seems to be positive) is making STID die a little sooner, same with the other films. IM3 had the benefit of an early start to go with it's universal popularity. Still think it's odd because both STID and MoS are light years better....but I digress...

The WW total stands at $415,310,916 and it looks like only these late foreign openings will keep STID in the $440-450 million range.