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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Movie studios use a system called box office reporting to make sure cinemas pay them the right amount. Cinemas have special computer systems that count the number of tickets sold for each movie, and they have to report this information to the movie studios. Sometimes, movie studios send people to check the ticket sales and compare them with the actual number of people who attended. If a cinema cheats, the movie studio can impose penalties or stop allowing them to show their movies.
I was under the impression that 100% of the box office sales goes to the movie companies and the theater only makes money on concessions. Which is one of the reasons why the confessions are so high. I may be wrong though.
So the answer for a lot of situations like this are 3rd party companies. I had been a part of one that inventories pharmacies. As it is a similar situation in which the pharmacy could claim to less or more of a certain drug. Since my company counted them it makes it so they can’t lie about it. I also think this is done to ensure no one is stealing.
I worked in a movie theater for 3 years and we had to save the ticket stubs and retain them for auditing purposes. All coupons or discounts had to be properly notated as well. Never once had we been audited while I worked there though. Just had a storage room filled with bags of movie tickets and coupons. I have no idea how long they had to be kept for. This was 2016-2019
Thank goodness for Rentrak, otherwise movie theaters might try to sneak in an extra ‘ghost’ viewer or two!
Thank goodness for Rentrak, otherwise Hollywood would be full of unpaid interns counting heads.
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