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ilianFIlm

How to understand box-office figures

12/4/2014

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It seems everybody talks about box office figures when they talk about a film or a movie. Why?

Partly the notion that box-office dollars are like scores in a contest. The number one film is the winner, and people tend to like to hear about winners. Also there’s a vague assumption that if a film is packing them in, people must like it and therefore it’s worth seeing. Thus reports of big ticket sales in many cases may prolong the a film’s success.


The trouble with this is: Although gross BO returns are the only things getting reported on TV news, they are far from the only gauge of a film’s success. There’s a lot more to be learned.

First, consider the total number of screens a film is playing on. These days big films routinely start out in around 3000 theaters, and a few that are virtually guaranteed to be hits start out in even more (4324 for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and 4223 for Shrek 2). In multiplexes, they play on two or even three screens. Unless a blockbuster is released on the same weekend as another blockbuster (and the studios juggle their schedules to avoid such confrontations), it’s almost bound to win the weekend.
But how many people are in each of those theaters? Anything over $5000 per theater is considered reasonably successful, but usually the top films do better than that, The Departed, averaged $8911.
On the other side,
Judged by per-screen averages, there are quite a few independent and foreign films playing in art houses that do very well indeed. The indie hit Little Miss Sunshine opened in only seven theaters its first weekend (July 28-30), but it brought in $52,999 in each. (It had actually opened July 26, so that was actually a five-day count.) After eleven weeks in release, Little Miss Sunshine has “only” grossed $55,010,203. Does that mean it’s actually not a hit?

That strategy of opening a film in only a small number of theaters is called “platforming.” It’s done with small films that the distributors think will get good reviews and word-of-mouth. If it fails, at least the company will have saved on prints and advertising (P&A). P & A create costs for the distributor that often go well beyond the announced production budget. A major Hollywood company can spend tens of millions of dollars on them. In extreme cases P & A add fifty per cent to the total cost of making, marketing, and distributing a film. The public seldom hears figures for P & A, so people may get the impression that a film is more profitable for its maker than it really is.
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    People who critique moving pictures fall into 3 general classes:

    1.
    Reviewers - are generally journalists who describe the contents and general tone of a movie, with only incidental emphasis on aesthetic evaluation. 

    2.
    Critics - are also journalists for the most part, but their emphasis is more on evaluation than on mere content description. 

    3.
    Theorists - are usually professional academics, often the authors of books on how movies can be studied on amore philosophical level.

    Author

    I'm a film critic and I like to write about films that are exceptional and stand above the rest. 

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    "The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in it that shouldn't be, what is not in it that could be. He is a good critic if he helps people understand more about the work that they could see for themselves; he is a great critic, if by his understandings and feeling for the work, by his passion, he can excite people so that they want to experience more of the art that is there, waiting to be seized. He is not necessarily bad critic if he makes errors in judgement. He is a bad critic if he does not awaken the curiosity, enlarge the interests and understanding of his audience. The art of the critic is to transmit his knowledge of and enthusiasm for art to others." ( Pauline Kael )
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