It seems like even before the first weekend is over, all the box office analysts have already declared the success or failure of the movie. I know personally, I don’t see a movie until the end of the run, so I don’t have to deal with huge crowds and lines and bad seats, it’s safe to say that nearly everyone I know follows suit. Doesn’t the entire run – including theater receipts, pay per view, home media sales, etc. – have to be considered for that hit or flop call is made? If not, why?
In: 1396
Answer: Lived in LA for a time, they give the movie away for free for a NDA to gauge audience sentiment all the time.
Market research my friend, way before release, but that doesn’t always mean it’s true/accurate and then you’ll see ‘smashed the box office unexpectedly!’
Because movies are most newsworthy when they’re new. It’s a reasonably good indicator of potential success too, but I think that’s secondary to the relevance and interest in box office success information reducing as you move away from initial release. If you love a film and are concerned by box office flop reporting, fret not. Shawshank Redemption, Office Space, Fightclub, The Big Lebowski, and many other hits were all considered flops.
Responding to this part: ” I’m still not sure what value they see in declaring the results so early, but I’ll accept that there must be some logic behind it.”
In short: being able to be the first to “break the news” just like any other news organizations. This is why elections are often called this way or that way well before the official count. It’s to gain “credibility” points for the said news organization (or in this case box office analyst site) and being able to say “you hear it here first.”
Of course their analysis might be wrong and they sometimes are, and at the end only the real income matters (not the analysts’ projected income). That doesn’t stop them from declaring it early though. It just causes them to say “whoops our bad, now click here for 5 reasons why our analysis wasn’t right”
Because what’s the point of declaring a movie a success or a failure once no one is talking about it anymore ?
Random media : “Now that the War of the Napkin is no longer on theater, we can safely claim it was a mighty success on the box office.”
You, scrolling your news feed : “Huh. Well, why would I read that article. Move on, no one cares about it right now. Oh, what’s that?
Other media : “YOU WON’T BELIEVE how much Mugshot is going to make at the box office!?”
You : “I must read this right now!”
For the most part, movies make less and less money in the 2nd weekend, 3rd weekend and so on. There are a few exceptions but most of the time it follows that pattern.
So if a movie makes $100M on it’s opening weekend and $45M the following weekend, that’s generally enough data to extrapolate roughly how much it’ll make in its whole run.
Occasionally a movie like Avatar comes by and pretty much keeps consistent weekly earnings for a couple of months but that is super rare.
Calling something a flop after it’s first weekend is acceptable, as you can do a rough estimate of its total earnings using average week to week drop off calculations.
After it’s 2nd weekend though, you’ve got enough data for a pretty accurate prediction.
You and your friends waiting a month to see a movie isn’t really a good indication of when the general public goes to see movies, look up some stats but movies make the majority of their earnings in the first 2 weeks.
it’s all more interesting nowadays because if you can get people to leave their house and go see a movie, rather than wait for it on x delivery service, that means something.
A lot of, if not most, ‘event-based’ things in life don’t have a very long tail. What does this mean? Well, if you are trying to make people interact with something you made (a movie, a video-game, an e-mail, a questionnaire,…) and that comes out in a market that regularly renews itself (there’s new movies in theatres every week, new video-games, there’s so many e-mails and questionnaires all the time,…), you will get the majority of your interactions in the first 24-72 hours, after which it trails off. Back when I was a student we were taught that 80-90% of our clicks/reads on e-mail marketing would happen in the first 24 hours, and after that we’d see it trickle in for a few more days.
The same thing happens with a movie, but it’s even more accentuated because of how a theatre will plan its rooms! Say you’ve got a big superhero movie you’ll launch in a few years, so you start telling everyone about it, and there’s a nice buzz going. Theatres will start tentatively planning to have 4 of their 10 rooms for that movie when it launches. But then, OH NO, the star of the movie turns out to be rather insane, and the preview viewings are having pretty mid-reactions. Pre-sale tickets are also not going so smoothly, so the theatre will scale back to 3 out of 10 rooms, maybe people will just show up on the day of the launch. On the day of the launch, nope, every room is only filled for 1/3 of capacity. After a few days they see that even less people show up, so they only use one more room to show this movie, and it’s never full to capacity. It’s better for the movie theatre to schedule in other movies that sell more tickets.
The studio, the marketing people, the reviewers all see these numbers, and know that the largest amount of people has already gone to see the movie. They have seen this happen hundreds and thousand of times before, and 99.99% of the times they know what this will lead to: very low ticket sales, no chance to get out of this death spiral, no way of recuperating the costs of making the movie. Like a flash in a pan, all the money is gone.
Because experiential exponential decay models are a thing.
If the starting point is below what the expectations are for making money on the movie, it is a flop
Something interesting that I heard awhile back was that when cellphones started to get popular it effected Fiona box office numbers because people could share with their friends immediately what they thought of the film. This was obviously before any social media existed.
Someone gets paid to work it out and give us their opinion,they’re often very wrong and a lot of the time it seems they didn’t watch the same film the avearge user watched. Not in a sense it’s any different of a film, but more the eyes of the beholder type thing. Critics should be taken with a pinch of salt. It’s just egos all the way down, i personally have never not enjoyed any film I’ve watched, I can find value in most films.
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