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
Simply looking at tickets sold doesn’t account for each movie costing a different amount to make. If one movie cost $500,000 dollars to make and the other cost $2 million to make and each sold the same number of tickets which equated to $1 million in ticket sales the first movie was pretty successful and the second movie was a failure. Basically, equivalent ticket sales does not mean equivalent success.
Industry news focus on money because studios want to make money off releasing the film. The amount of money made versus the amount of money spent on making and marketing the film is what people in the film sector are interested in. It’s not supposed to be a scientific comparison, and not relevant for whether the movie is good of course.
OP also forgot to take into account that the population also increases. So if anything, thicket sales should be measured by percentage of pop that see the film, or percentage of movie goers
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
Not all tickets are equal. You got premium tickets, IMAX/3d tickets, discounted tickets, and everything else in between.
Population does change too. There are more people available today to see movies than there were.
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.
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.
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.
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