Why do blockbuster movies like Avatar and End Game have there success measured in terms of money made instead of tickets sold, wouldn’t that make it easier to compare to older movies without accounting for today’s dollar vs a dollar 30 years ago?
In: Economics
For statistic and box office nerds? Absolutely. But the industry doesn’t care about any of that just how much money they made.
Also they don’t just make money on tickets sold, but home media release and other things like that. Is ticket sales would become obscured once the movie reached the cheap theatres.
Using that logic it should be tickets sold as percentage of population. After all there are a LOT more people around today than 30 years ago!
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Wouldn’t really help for comparisons. There were a lot less people 30 years ago… Even less that could afford the luxury of going to theaters but if you disregard that, I think it would be easier to figure out inflation of a dollar vs the “inflation” of population. Think about it, 4.5 billion worldwide population 30 years ago vs 7.7 billion today.
I work in the industry.
1. Comparing take to budget makes calculating profit easy.
2. It’s easy to manipulate and thus makes being a hit easier. You can increase prices for special showings and juice the numbers.
3. Per screen average is what insiders care about. Many movies don’t make it to theaters outside LA and NY. People can’t see those movies even if they want to. How many people who can see a movie, choose to, is what matters, as a local hit can be released wider if need be. A ton of crappy movies get massive releases to milk the morons and then disappear. They make a lot simply because they are showing everywhere and are heavily advertised.
In France, we do measure success by number of attendees rather than money made. In part because a lot of the film budgets are subsidised by public money so films are made and not necessarily considered as failures even if they lose money.
Population does change too. There are more people available today to see movies than there were.
Not all tickets are equal. You got premium tickets, IMAX/3d tickets, discounted tickets, and everything else in between.
Because a movie has yet to beat the classic Gone with the Wind adjusted for inflation, and a headline that a movie is the 17th highest grossing film adjusted for inflation is not sexy at all.
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
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