If there is one Hollywood trend that finally needs to die in 2011, it’s measuring successes by box office gross. Gross revenue is the most fallacious measuring stick to rate the performance of a film. It’s totally meaningless. But I do have hope. 3D films might finally blow the lid on how erroneous box office gross is.
The film industry is the only media industry that does not measure success by units sold — ticket sales. Using gross revenue is an apples to oranges method of comparison. As any movie buff knows, the price of movie tickets increases every year because of inflation. Average ticket prices didn’t break $1.00 until the mid-1960s — so of course most films that come out today gross more than virtually every film from 30 and 40 years ago.
Consider this: in 2000 $7.7 billion worth of movie tickets were sold and in 2010 it was $10.3 billion. Yet, the number of tickets sold dropped. 1.4 billion tickets were sold in 2000 and only 1.3 billion in 2010. And now, 3D movies have created a situation where we’re comparing apples to oranges in the same year.
3D tickets cost on average of 30% more than standard 2D tickets. Alice in Wonderland made $116 million during its opening weekend. 70 percent of that revenue came from 3D theaters. If you remove the 30% 3D surcharge, the opening weekend drops to $97.3 million. Let’s say for the sake of argument that 70% of the film’s domestic revenue came from 3D sales — it’s $334 million gross is reduced to $280 million, and the movie would go from the 2nd highest grossing film of 2010 to 5th. Inception and Harry Potter — both of which only sold 2D tickets — would move up in the rankings.
Measuring success using only tickets sales would clearly solve the problem of ranking 3D movies against 2D, but it still wouldn’t be an apples to apples solution when it come to comparing the performance of recently released movies to ones of yesteryear.
If we’re really serious about measuring the performance of films over time — was Star Wars more popular than Avatar?; does Gone With the Wind really beat them all? — then we have to move to a per capita system. The number of tickets sold doesn’t give us the full story because the population and number of screens have changed.
The current top grossing film of all time, Avatar, sold an estimated 97 million tickets. Rear window, released in 1954 sold about half as many tickets: 50 million. Even when you adjust Rear Window’s 1950s gross it still ranks only 93 on the list of all time adjusted gross; Avatar is 14. Here’s where the plot thickens.
In 1954 the US population was 163 million. In 2009 it was 308 million. Both films’ US population per capita ticket sales were almost the same — about a third of the population bought tickets to the films. That would seem to indicate that both were about equal in their popularity. But wait, there’s more to consider.
There are two other factors: accessibility to movies — the number of screens — and the number of films in release. Using the Rear Window example, there were 527 feature films released in 1954 and 518 in 2009. The number of theaters per capita is also the same. So on all fronts the movies seem to be equally popular.
Some people will argue that movies today have more competition from things like the internet, video games and TV than they did in the 1950s, and there is some truth to that. In 1954 the average person purchased 16.37 tickets; in 2009 they purchased 4.61. But since the mid 1960s the number of tickets purchased per person has remained at 5 +/- 0.5 — so the impact of TV, home video, video games, the internet, etc is debatable. Still, that would give Avatar some edge over Rear Window, but they still performed surprisingly similarly.
It’s worth focusing on the issue of the number of screens because that number has oscillated. In 1977, the year Star Wars came out, there were only 16,050 screens. With a population of 220 million, that’s nearly one screen per 13,707 people. So many screens have been added that even with the population explosion we’re down to one screen per 7,850 people. That kind of explains why we don’t hear many stories anymore about people waiting in lines (and internet ticket sales have certainly helped ease congestion on box office queues).
There is of course someone on the internet who has taken all of this data and put together a top grossing list that takes into account population and per capita ticket trends, and only looks at ticket sales for the original release. The Sound of Music, The Exorcist and E.T. take the top 3 spots. Star Wars comes in 12th, Avatar 15th, and Gone with the Wind 24th.
My theory on the reason why the movie industry loves domestic gross is because it’s a huge number that makes movies seem more profitable than they really are. All the studios are owned by corporations, and the sight of so much liquid cash flow helps boost stock prices. When you hear a movie grossed $1 billion worldwide, stockholders are less concerned that $200 million was spent on production, $150 on marketing, movie theaters will get 55% of the ticket sales, and the director and stars are all also getting a percent of the revenue.
But what bugs me about the whole issue is the way Hollywood makes it sound like their dreck are cultural phenomena. Transformers 2 sold only 3 million more tickets than Rear Window despite there being nearly twice as many ticket buyers today than in the 1950s. I could go on with examples like this forever. The fact is, fewer people are going to the movies and Hollywood is running out of ways of masking this.
