Movie Box Office

Have you ever noticed the success of movies is measured in dollars not attendance?  Why is that?

Television shows aren’t judged by the amount of money they make?  The announcer at a ballgame informs you of the attendance, not the gate receipts?

The reason why moves are measured in dollars and not viewers: if you knew how few people actually went to the movies, you’d laugh.  Then when you finally stopped laughing you’d realize that Hollywood, in terms of its audience size, is quite small.

For instance, for the weekend of October 31st to November 2nd 2008, High School Musical 3: Senior Year grossed $15,316,072.  The edgy Zack and Miri Make a Porno grossed $10,065,630.

I choose those two movies because one has a devout following (albeit with tweens) and the other is, of course, edgy.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) the average price of a movie ticket in 2007 was $6.88.

I’ll pause why fall out of your chair laughing.

I have no idea how the MPAA came up with that number—even taking discounts into consideration.  I would put the average price of a movie ticket somewhere near $10.  Still, 2008 projections have ticket prices somewhere in the $7.10 range.  For our purposes, and to help my suspect math skills, we’ll use $7.00 as the average ticket price.

Doing the math (dividing the box office gross by seven), High School Musical 3 was seen by 2,188,010 people and the edgy Zack and Miri was seen by 1,437,947 people.

Conversely, the top rated television show for the week ending on October 27th, 2008 was “Dancing With The Stars.”  Meaning, over 18 million people turned in to watch B-list celebrities strut their stuff on the dance floor.

A bad television show, airing once, was seen by nearly nine-times more people than the top grossing film of the weekend, which was shown numerous times in a three-day period.

To put into perspective how few people see movies in the theater, if our cinematic examples were actually televisions shows, HSM3 would be equivalent to “America’s Next Top Model” on the CW and the edgy Zack and Miri would be equivalent to “Sabado Gigante” on Univision.

Granted, I picked a fairly important week for television and relatively unimportant week for movies, although according to the media, every 12 year-old in the world wants to see HSM3 and, let’s not forget, Zack and Miri is edgy!

Fine, let’s take a look at the highest grossing movie of 2008: The Dark Knight (which just so happens to be the second highest grossing movie of all-time).

The Batman movie has made $527,847,433 (that’s just in U.S.).  Using our average ticket price of $7.00 and our calculator, 75,406,776 Americans sat in movie theater and watched Batman prance around Gotham.  Had the Dark Knight been a television show, it would have been the most watch primetime telecast of the 21st century… that wasn’t a Super Bowl.

A Super Bowl airs once; the Dark Knight was in theaters for months.

Now we know why Hollywood releases dollar amounts and not attendance figures.  It’s embarrassing to realize more people watch a television show like “Extreme Makeover: Home Addition” (again, airing only once) than coveted films—works of art that are slobbered over by the media—like “Burn After Reading.”

In fact, I surmise move theater audiences are even smaller.  I usually divide the gross of a film by 10 and use that as an attendance figure.  That number is probably a more accurate representation of the drawing power of Hollywood.

Now, who wants to watch CSI?