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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A company named rentrak, controls theater ticket tracking. As a third party, they are responsible for reporting actual attendance. Beyond their digital fingers in the till, they send out field investigators when a theaters attendance figures for a film do not align with their historical metrics.
There is a 3rd party company named Rentrak (that was recently bought by comScore) that collects the numbers and submits them to the studios. They randomly send out counters that go to the movies and count heads and compare that to the submitted values.
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.
Occasionally places get in trouble for cooking the books. The most recent I remember was the Washington football team. (The NFL has a fairly similar system to movie theaters where the home team keeps 60 percent of each ticket price and 40 percent goes to the visiting team.) They intentionally miscoded ticket sales in their computer accounting system to make them look like Kenny Chesney concert tickets (which didn’t have to be shared).
They report their POS (point of sale) reports to the studios. Now that they are all on digital reporting it’s very easy to determine what the studios cut is.
All these answers are good, but also realize the amount of money they could make by skimming ticket sales is waaaay less than the legal fees and penalties if they were caught. For publicly owned theater chains like amc or regal it just is t worth it.
What if they make the cinemas pay for all the seats and have them take the loss if the movie does badly?
Because it’s incredibly easy to send a random counter into a theatre to check the numbers, and if a theatre got caught, it’d be a massive legal shitstorm
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