Box office

There are numerous websites that monitor box-office receipts, such as , , , A Box Office, , and . These sites provide box office information for hundreds of movies. Data for older movies is often incomplete due to the way box office reporting evolved, especially in the U.S., and the availability of information prior to the introduction of the internet.[]

started reporting box office results by theatre on March 3, 1922 to give exhibitors around the country information on a film's performance on Broadway, which was often where first run showings of a film were held. In addition to New York City, they also endeavoured to include all of the key cities in the U.S. in future and initially also reported results for 10 other cities including Chicago and Los Angeles. was released and included a list of the top 104 grossing films for the past year. In 1937, began publishing box office reports.[]

In 1946, Variety started to publish a weekly National Box Office survey on page 3 indicating the performance of the week's hits and flops based on the box office results of 25 key U.S. cities.

Later in 1946, Variety published a list of All-Time Top Grossers with a list of films that had achieved or gave promise of earning $4,000,000 or more in domestic (U.S. and Canada) . Variety would publish an updated all-time list annually for over 50 years, normally in their anniversary edition each January.[15] The anniversary edition would also normally contain the list of the top performing films of the year.

In the late 1960s, Variety used an computer to collate the grosses from their weekly reports of 22 to 24 U.S. cities from January 1, 1968. The data came from up to 800 theatres which represented around 5% of the U.S. cinema population at the time but around one-third of the total U.S. box office grosses. In 1969, Variety started to publish a list of the top 50 grossing films each week." was the number one on the first chart published for the week ending April 16, 1969.

In 1974, Nat Fellman founded Exhibitor Relations Co., the first company set up to track box office grosses, which it collected from the studios.

Except for disclosures by the studios on very successful films, total domestic (U.S. and Canada) box office gross information for films was not readily available until National Gross Service started to collate this data around 1981. The collation of grosses led to wider reporting of domestic box office grosses for films. Arthur D. Murphy, a former lieutenant at Variety was one of the first to organize and chart that information and report it in a meaningful form.[21] During the 1980s, Daily Variety started to publish a weekly chart of the domestic box office grosses of films collated from the studios as compared to the Top 50 chart in Variety which was based on a sample of theatre grosses from key markets.

Gradually the focus of a film's performance became its box office gross rather than the rentals that Variety continued to report annually. Prior to the tracking of these grosses, domestic or worldwide box office grosses is not available for many earlier films so the only domestic or worldwide data available is still often the rental figures.

Murphy started to publish Art Murphy's Box Office Register annually from 1984 detailing U.S. box office grosses. In 1990, EDI opened an office in the UK, moved into Germany in 1993 and Spain in 1995 reporting box office data for those markets. in 1997 for $26 million and became Nielsen EDI. When was launched in 1990 it started to publish the top 10 box office weekend lists from Exhibitor Relations and the company was also supplying box office data to companies such as the , .

On August 7, 1998, Box Office Mojo was launched by Brandon Gray and in 1999 he started posting the Friday grosses sourced from Exhibitor Relations so that they were publicly available for free online on Saturdays In July 2008, Box Office Mojo was purchased by through its , .

started tracking box office data from point of sale in 2001 and started to rival EDI in providing the studios with data.

Box office reporting paused for the first time since its inception on March 19, 2020, as nearly all theaters nationwide were closed because of the ., which are typically not included in box office reporting, remained open.[34]

Box office lists

For lists of films which are major box-office hits, see , and . Films that are considered to have been very unsuccessful at the box office are called or box office flops. For a list of these films, see .

To determine if a movie made a profit, it is not correct to directly compare the box office gross with the , because the keeps nearly half of the gross on average. The split varies from movie to movie, and the percentage for the distributor is generally higher in early weeks. Usually the distributor gets a percentage of the revenue after first deducting a "house allowance" or "house nut". It is also common that the distributor gets either a percentage of the gross revenue, or a higher percentage of the revenue after deducting the nut, whichever is larger.
The distributor's share of the box office gross is often referred to as the "distributor rentals", especially for box office reporting of older films.[37]

The following is film industry specific terminology used by box office reporters such as Variety and . weekend, however, with the increased regularity of reporting of box office figures, a comparable 3-day figure for the Friday to Sunday is now also used. In particular, the weekend box office for the initial week of release, or opening weekend, is often widely reported. (See .)

Theaters is the number of theaters in which the movie is showing. Since a single theater may show a movie on multiple screens, the total number of screens or engagements is used as another measure. The theaters measure is used to classify whether a film is in , meaning at least 600 theaters, or which is less than 600 theaters. Occasionally, a film may achieve wide release after an initial limited release; is an example of this.

Gross refers to gross earnings. On average, the movie's distributor receives a little more than half of the final gross (often referred to as the rentals) with the remainder going to the exhibitor (i.e., movie theater).

Multiple is the ratio of a film's total gross to that of the opening weekend. A film that earns $20 million on its opening weekend and finishes with $80 million has a multiple of 4. From 2004 to 2014, films viewers graded as A+ on had a 4.8 multiple, while films graded as F had a 2.2 multiple. Other countries which historically reported box office figures in terms of admissions include European countries such as Germany, Italy, and Spain, the , and South Korea. Box Office Mojo estimates the North American ticket sales by dividing the domestic box office gross by the (ATP) of a given year, a method that Box Office India uses to estimate Indian footfalls (ticket sales). See for the films with the highest known estimated ticket sales.

Distributor rentals

Box-office figures are reported in the form of either gross receipts or distributor rentals, the latter being especially true of older films. Commonly mistaken for revenue, the rentals are the distributor's share of the film's theatrical revenue i.e. the box office gross less the exhibitor's cut. Historically, the rental price averaged at 30–40% when the distributors owned the theater chains, equating to just over a third of the gross being paid to the distributor of the film.

Average ticket price

The average ticket price (ATP) is the average cost to purchase a film ticket at the box office in any given year. According to the , the ATP is "calculated as the total revenues generated from tickets sales divided by the number of feature film tickets sold during the year of reference."[46]