How do movie studios know that cinemas are paying them correctly?

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Movie studios get a percentage of ticket sales. How do they know that cinemas, especially small independent ones, are reporting their ticket sales correctly? Couldn’t a cinema just claim that a screening had 20 paying viewers when in reality they sold 300 and keep the entire extra revenue for themselves? Or do cinemas have to pay per screening regardless of how many people are in the cinema?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m sure there’s electronic tie-ins to the ticketing system now, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they still do some of it manually. Back in high school, in the late 90s, my brother got a job one summer working for a distributor and what he did was go in literally count heads in a random sampling of showings.

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