News
Cinema Metric-Tickets Or Dollars?
By Robert Marich
Feb. 1, 2010 – Wall Street Journal columnist Carl Bialik laments that most widely accepted metric to measure box office is revenue and not headcount/ticket unit sales, because the dollar revenue metric does not account for inflation.
The occasion for raising this issue is that 20th Century Fox’s Avatar is surpassing 1997’s Titanic (from the same studio and filmmaker James Cameron) as the all time box office champ—measured in dollars.
“Of the top 25 grossing films of all time on Hollywood.com's U.S. box-office ranking, 18 were released in the past decade,” writes Bialik in the WSJ. “Adjust the totals for higher admission prices mainly due to inflation, and Avatar would be the only one of those 18 to make the list—at No. 24, as of Thursday.”
Bialik is a regular WSJ contributor looking at data issues under the name the The Numbers Guy. Ordinarily, I like his columns but I have two nits here.
First, not all tickets are equal. A kiddie film will draw a disproportionally large number of cheap “children’s tickets” and so unit ticket sales is not a direct comparison to an R-rated film where all tickets are top-cost adult prices. Also, 3-D tickets carry a $2-3 premium.
Second, films increasingly are available as legal DVD and online rentals and purchases, so of course that’s going to keep a lid on admissions/unit sales. The real question is whether exhibitors and Hollywood can make cinema special enough to keep raising ticket prices – like with 3-D—to maintain revenue.
In other media, the WSJ article notes that Broadway stage measures industry economics in revenue and not ticket sales, as does cinema. However, TV audience levels are scaled to “ratings” that are a percent of TV households—so it is adjusted for the era. Today, there are roughly 114 million TV households, so each national rating point represents 1.14 million households. Years ago when there were 95 million TV households, a rating point represented 950,000 households.
Though not mentioned in the article, cinema would look particularly bad with a TV-rating-point like analysis. Ticket sales/headcount has remained steady at 1.1-1.4 billion since the 1980s—which is a good thing given platforms showing the same movies have proliferated. But a growth in population would show a “movie rating” in decline, given admissions aren’t growing like the overall population.
“The rebound (from admissions drops in the 1970s) came as Hollywood began to cater to the youth market,
By the way, national box office was compiled only beginning in the mid 1980s. Before that, box office was reported on city-by-city basis—with no reliable overall figures.
As Marketing to Moviegoers: Second Edition notes, “Hollywood is obsessed with film grosses—as it should be,” and offers this pithy slice of dialog from TV series Entourage in which star-handler Eric chats up Emily, the secretary of a powerful agent:
Emily: Are you nervous? . . . Ari has clients who do crazy stuff. Like one of them bought $3 million of tickets just to make sure his movie opened number one.
Eric: Come on.
Emily: I swear!
Eric: Who was it?
Emily: I can’t tell.
Eric: Yes, you can. Tell me.
Emily: He was in Ocean’s 11.
Eric: Aaaaaah.
—HBO TV series Entourage, episode “The Review,” scripted by Doug Ellin
For full text, click link below:
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031813961239170.html
www.marketingmovies.net/news/avatar-looks-to-accelerate-3D-tix-markup/
www.marketingmovies.net/chapters/chapter-8-exhibition-theaters/
www.marketingmovies.net/news/rentrak-buys-Nielsens-BO-data-outfit-edi/