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A box office or ticket office is a place where
tickets Ticket or tickets may refer to: Slips of paper * Lottery ticket * Parking ticket, a ticket confirming that the parking fee was paid (and the time of the parking start) * Toll ticket, a slip of paper used to indicate where vehicles entered a tol ...
are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a
countertop A countertop, also counter top, counter, benchtop, worktop (British English) or kitchen bench (Australian or New Zealand English), bunker (Scottish English) is a raised, firm, flat, and horizontal surface. They are built for work in kitchens or o ...
, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a
wicket In cricket, the term wicket has several meanings: * It is one of the two sets of three stumps and two bails at either end of the pitch. The fielding team's players can hit the wicket with the ball in a number of ways to get a batsman out. ...
. By extension, the term is frequently used, especially in the context of the
film industry The film industry or motion picture industry comprises the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking, i.e., film production companies, film studios, cinematography, animation, film production, screenwriting, pre-production, post ...
, as a synonym for the amount of business a particular production, such as a film or theatre show, receives. The term is also used to refer to a ticket office at an
arena An arena is a large enclosed platform, often circular or oval-shaped, designed to showcase theatre, musical performances, or sporting events. It is composed of a large open space surrounded on most or all sides by tiered seating for spectators ...
or a
stadium A stadium ( : stadiums or stadia) is a place or venue for (mostly) outdoor sports, concerts, or other events and consists of a field or stage either partly or completely surrounded by a tiered structure designed to allow spectators to stand o ...
. ''Box office'' business can be measured in the terms of the number of tickets sold or the amount of money raised by ticket sales (
revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods and services related to the primary operations of the business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some companies receive reven ...
). The projection and analysis of these earnings is greatly important for the creative industries and often a source of interest for fans. This is predominant in the
Hollywood movie industry The cinema of the United States, consisting mainly of major film studios (also known as Hollywood) along with some independent film, has had a large effect on the global film industry since the early 20th century. The dominant style of Ame ...
. To determine if a movie made a profit, it is not correct to directly compare the box office gross with the
production budget Production budget is a term used specifically in film production and, more generally, in business. A "film production budget" determines how much will be spent on the entire film project. This involves identifying the elements and then estimatin ...
, because the
movie theater A movie theater (American English), cinema (British English), or cinema hall ( Indian English), also known as a movie house, picture house, the movies, the pictures, picture theater, the silver screen, the big screen, or simply theater is a ...
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.


Etymology

The name box office was used at the Globe Theatre, owned by William Shakespeare, and also in wider
Elizabethan theatre English Renaissance theatre, also known as Renaissance English theatre and Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1558 and 1642. This is the style of the plays of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. ...
. Admission was collected in a
tudor money box A Tudor money box (or Tudor money pot) is a glazed earthenware container used in late Medieval Britain as a small, portable bank for collecting and saving money. The typical money box was a round, sealed, green-glazed pot with a vertical coin sl ...
by a ticket seller at the entrance to the theatre. While the name box office was used in Elizabethan theatre, there is disagreement around whether the term originates from this time. The term box office was being widely used from at least 1786, deriving from the office from which theatre boxes were being sold.William and Mary Morris, ''Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins'', HarperCollins, New York, 1977, 1988Robert Hendrickson, ''Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins,'' Facts on File, New York, 1997 The term box office was being used to describe total sales from at least 1904.box office
in the Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, 2001


Related terminology

The following is film industry specific terminology used by box office reporters such as ''Variety'' and
Box Office Mojo Box Office Mojo is an American website that tracks box-office revenue in a systematic, algorithmic way. The site was founded in 1998 by Brandon Gray, and was bought in 2008 by IMDb, which itself is owned by Amazon. History Brandon Gray began ...
. For films released in North America, box office figures are usually divided between domestic, meaning the United States and Canada, and foreign which includes all other countries. Weekly box office figures are now normally taken to be from Friday through Thursday to allow for the fact that most films are officially released in the United States on a Friday. With ''Variety'' being published for many years every Wednesday, most weekly box office figures they reported from the 1920s to the 1990s were for the week from Thursday to Wednesday. A large component of the weekly gross is the weekend box office. Historically, this was reported as the box office receipts around Friday through Sunday plus any public holidays close to the weekend, such as a 4-day
Memorial Day Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) is a federal holiday in the United States for mourning the U.S. military personnel who have fought and died while serving in the United States armed forces. It is observed on the last Monda ...
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 List of biggest opening weekends.) 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
wide release In the American motion picture industry, a wide release (short for nationwide release) is a film playing at the same time at cinemas in most markets across the country. This is in contrast to the formerly common practice of a roadshow theatrical re ...
, meaning at least 600 theaters, or
limited release __FORCETOC__ Limited theatrical release is a film distribution strategy of releasing a new film in a few theaters across a country, typically art house theaters in major metropolitan markets. Since 1994, a limited theatrical release in the Unite ...
which is less than 600 theaters. Occasionally, a film may achieve wide release after an initial limited release; ''
Little Miss Sunshine ''Little Miss Sunshine'' is a 2006 American tragicomedy road film and the feature film directorial debut of the husband–wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. The screenplay was written by first-time writer Michael Arndt. The film sta ...
'' 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
CinemaScore CinemaScore is a market research firm based in Las Vegas. It surveys film audiences to rate their viewing experiences with letter grades, reports the results, and forecasts box office receipts based on the data. Background Ed Mintz founded Ci ...
had a 4.8 multiple, while films graded as F had a 2.2 multiple. most major Hollywood films have a multiple of about 2.5. Admissions refers to the number of tickets sold at the box office. In countries such as France, box office reporting was historically reported in terms of admissions, with rules regulated by the government and fines issued if exhibitors failed to report the data. Other countries which historically reported box office figures in terms of admissions include European countries such as Germany, Italy, and Spain, the
Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
, and South Korea. Box Office Mojo estimates the North American ticket sales by dividing the domestic box office gross by the average ticket price (ATP) of a given year, a method that Box Office India uses to estimate Indian footfalls (ticket sales). See ''
List of films by box office admissions The following table lists known estimated box office ticket sales for various high-grossing films that have sold at least tickets worldwide. Note that some of the data are incomplete due to a lack of available admissions data from a number of b ...
'' for the films with the highest known estimated ticket sales.


Box office lists

For lists of films which are major box-office hits, see ''
List of highest-grossing films Films generate income from several revenue streams, including theatrical exhibition, home video, television broadcast rights, and merchandising. However, theatrical box-office earnings are the primary metric for trade publications in assess ...
'', ''
List of films by box office admissions The following table lists known estimated box office ticket sales for various high-grossing films that have sold at least tickets worldwide. Note that some of the data are incomplete due to a lack of available admissions data from a number of b ...
'' and ''
Lists of highest-grossing films The following are lists of high-grossing films. Worldwide grosses * List of highest-grossing films ** List of highest-grossing non-English films ** List of highest-grossing puppet films ** List of highest-grossing R-rated films ** List of high ...
''. Films that are considered to have been very unsuccessful at the box office are called
box office bomb A box-office bomb, or box-office disaster, is a film that is unprofitable or considered highly unsuccessful during its theatrical run. Although any film for which the production, marketing, and distribution costs combined exceed the revenue after ...
s or box office flops. For a list of these films, see ''
List of box office bombs In the film and media industry, if a film released in theatres fails to break even by a large amount, it is considered a box office bomb (or box office flop), thus losing money for the distributor, studio, and/or production company that investe ...
''.


Box office reporting

There are numerous websites that monitor box-office receipts, such as ''
BoxOffice ''Boxoffice Pro'' is a film industry magazine dedicated to the movie theatre business published by BoxOffice Media LP. History It started in 1920 as ''The Reel Journal'', taking the name ''Boxoffice'' in 1931 and still publishes today, with ...
'',
Box Office Mojo Box Office Mojo is an American website that tracks box-office revenue in a systematic, algorithmic way. The site was founded in 1998 by Brandon Gray, and was bought in 2008 by IMDb, which itself is owned by Amazon. History Brandon Gray began ...
, The Numbers, A Box Office,
Box Office India Box Office India is an Indian film website. Its traffic ranking in India is 83,665 . A new Box Office India website went live on 20 January 2014. About Box Office India was launched on 10 June 2003. Its uses Whois privacy to anonymize its owne ...
,
Koimoi Koimoi is a Bollywood entertainment website providing Bollywood news, box-office reports and film reviews. In January 2021, its Alexa ranking in India was 2530. Origin On 23 November 2009, Contest2win.com and Komal Nahta's Faith Entertainment j ...
and
ShowBIZ Data Showbiz is a vernacular term for show business. Showbiz may also refer to: Music * ''Showbiz'' (Muse album), 1999, or the title track * ''Showbiz'' (Cud album), 1994 * Showbiz and A.G., an American hip hop duo * Grant Showbiz, a British record ...
. 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.


History


Rise of Hollywood

''
Variety Variety may refer to: Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats * Variety (radio) * Variety show, in theater and television Films * ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont * ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
'' 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. In 1929, the first issue of ''
The Motion Picture Almanac The ''International Television & Video Almanac'' is an annual almanac of the television and video industry that has been published under various titles since 1929. History The almanac was first published as ''The Motion Picture Almanac'' in 1929, ...
'' was released and included a list of the top 104 grossing films for the past year. In 1932, ''Variety'' published the studios' top-grossing films of the year and has maintained this tradition annually since. In 1937,
BoxOffice magazine ''Boxoffice Pro'' is a film industry magazine dedicated to the movie theatre business published by BoxOffice Media LP. History It started in 1920 as ''The Reel Journal'', taking the name ''Boxoffice'' in 1931 and still publishes today, with ...
began publishing box office reports. Beginning in the 1930s, BoxOffice magazine published a Barometer issue in January, which reported the performance of movies for the year expressed as percentages.


Golden era of film

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)
theatrical rental A box office or ticket office is a place where tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a wicket. By extension, the term is freq ...
s. This became a leading source of data for a film's performance. ''Variety'' would publish an updated all-time list annually for over 50 years, normally in their anniversary edition each January. The anniversary edition would also normally contain the list of the top performing films of the year.


Dawn of modern film industry

In the late 1960s, ''Variety'' used an
IBM 360 The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems that was announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and delivered between 1965 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applica ...
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. "
The Love Bug ''The Love Bug'' is a 1968 American comedy film directed by Robert Stevenson and the first in a franchise by Walt Disney Productions and distributed by Buena Vista Distribution that starred an anthropomorphic pearl-white, fabric-sunroofed 19 ...
" was the number one on the first chart published for the week ending April 16, 1969. The chart was discontinued in 1990. In 1974, Nat Fellman founded Exhibitor Relations Co., the first company set up to track box office grosses, which it collected from the studios. Two years later, Marcy Polier, an employee of the Mann theater chain, set up Centralized Grosses to collate U.S. daily box office data on a centralized basis from theaters rather than each theater chain collating their own numbers from other theater chains. The company later became National Gross Service then Entertainment Data, Inc. (EDI). 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
U.S. Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage o ...
lieutenant at ''Variety'' was one of the first to organize and chart that information and report it in a meaningful form. 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 1984, EDI started to report Canadian grosses as well and by 1985 was reporting data for 15,000 screens. In 1987, EDI set up a database of box office information which included data on certain films back to 1970. By 1991, all U.S. studios had agreed to share their complete data reports with EDI. 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. EDI were acquired by ACNielsen Corporation in 1997 for $26 million and became Nielsen EDI. By the 1990s, ''Daily Variety'' started to report studio's weekend estimates from Sundays on Monday mornings which led to other media reporting the data earlier. When ''
Entertainment Weekly ''Entertainment Weekly'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''EW'') is an American digital-only entertainment magazine based in New York City, published by Dotdash Meredith, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books, and popular cul ...
'' 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 ''
Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...
'',
CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...
and the
Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
. In 1994, ''Variety'' published their first annual global box office chart showing the top 100 grossing films internationally for the prior year. 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 and posted the Sunday estimates on Sundays. In July 2008, Box Office Mojo was purchased by
Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
through its
subsidiary A subsidiary, subsidiary company or daughter company is a company owned or controlled by another company, which is called the parent company or holding company. Two or more subsidiaries that either belong to the same parent company or having a s ...
,
IMDb IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...
.


Modern film industry

Rentrak Rentrak Corporation is a global media measurement and research company serving the entertainment industry. Rentrak is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, United States, with additional offices in the United States and around the world. In February ...
started tracking box office data from point of sale in 2001 and started to rival EDI in providing the studios with data. In December 2009, Rentrak acquired Nielsen EDI for $15 million, and became the sole provider of worldwide box office ticket sales revenue and attendance information which is used by many of the websites noted above. On October 23, 2019, Box Office Mojo unveiled a dramatic redesign resembling IMDb, and was rebranded as "Box Office Mojo by IMDbPro" with some of the content move to the subscription based IMDbPro. 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
coronavirus pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...
. Only
drive-in theater A drive-in theater or drive-in cinema is a form of movie theater, cinema structure consisting of a large outdoor movie screen, a projection booth, a concession stand, and a large parking area for automobiles. Within this enclosed area, customers ...
s, which are typically not included in box office reporting, remained open.


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
UNESCO Institute for Statistics The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the statistical office of UNESCO and is the UN depository for cross-nationally comparable statistics on education, science and technology, culture, and communication. The UIS was established in 1999. ...
, 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."


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
home video Home video is prerecorded media sold or rented for home viewing. The term originates from the VHS and Betamax era, when the predominant medium was videotapes, but has carried over to optical disc formats such as DVD, Blu-ray and streaming me ...
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. In the modern marketplace, rental fees can vary greatly—depending on a number of factors—although the films from the major studios average out at 43%.


See also

*
Box office territory A box office territory, in context of the film industry, ranges from a single country to a grouping of countries for reporting box office gross ticket sales. This is distinct from dependent territories, though such territories under a country's ad ...
*
Box-office bomb A box-office bomb, or box-office disaster, is a film that is unprofitable or considered highly unsuccessful during its theatrical run. Although any film for which the production, marketing, and distribution costs combined exceed the revenue after ...
*
Film industry The film industry or motion picture industry comprises the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking, i.e., film production companies, film studios, cinematography, animation, film production, screenwriting, pre-production, post ...
*
List of films by box office admissions The following table lists known estimated box office ticket sales for various high-grossing films that have sold at least tickets worldwide. Note that some of the data are incomplete due to a lack of available admissions data from a number of b ...
*
List of highest-grossing films Films generate income from several revenue streams, including theatrical exhibition, home video, television broadcast rights, and merchandising. However, theatrical box-office earnings are the primary metric for trade publications in assess ...
*
List of highest-grossing non-English films These are the highest-grossing, primarily non-English language films in the world. The vast majority of them are Chinese films. Film and language In terms of gross revenue, English-language films are vastly over-represented among the highes ...
*
Lists of box office number-one films The following are lists of films which have been placed number one at the weekend box office in a region. __TOC__ Lists Click "Region" to sort by region. See also * Box office * List of highest-grossing films * Lists of highest-grossing fil ...
*
Lists of highest-grossing films The following are lists of high-grossing films. Worldwide grosses * List of highest-grossing films ** List of highest-grossing non-English films ** List of highest-grossing puppet films ** List of highest-grossing R-rated films ** List of high ...
* Will call


References


External links

* {{Filmmaking Film and video terminology Film box office Parts of a theatre Stage terminology Tickets