Why do blockbuster movies like Avatar and End Game have there success measured in terms of money made instead of tickets sold, wouldn’t that make it easier to compare to older movies without accounting for today’s dollar vs a dollar 30 years ago?
In: Economics
Because a movie has yet to beat the classic Gone with the Wind adjusted for inflation, and a headline that a movie is the 17th highest grossing film adjusted for inflation is not sexy at all.
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm
OP also forgot to take into account that the population also increases. So if anything, thicket sales should be measured by percentage of pop that see the film, or percentage of movie goers
Industry news focus on money because studios want to make money off releasing the film. The amount of money made versus the amount of money spent on making and marketing the film is what people in the film sector are interested in. It’s not supposed to be a scientific comparison, and not relevant for whether the movie is good of course.
Simply looking at tickets sold doesn’t account for each movie costing a different amount to make. If one movie cost $500,000 dollars to make and the other cost $2 million to make and each sold the same number of tickets which equated to $1 million in ticket sales the first movie was pretty successful and the second movie was a failure. Basically, equivalent ticket sales does not mean equivalent success.
In France, we do measure success by number of attendees rather than money made. In part because a lot of the film budgets are subsidised by public money so films are made and not necessarily considered as failures even if they lose money.
Population does change too. There are more people available today to see movies than there were.
Not all tickets are equal. You got premium tickets, IMAX/3d tickets, discounted tickets, and everything else in between.
Also they don’t just make money on tickets sold, but home media release and other things like that. Is ticket sales would become obscured once the movie reached the cheap theatres.
Using that logic it should be tickets sold as percentage of population. After all there are a LOT more people around today than 30 years ago!
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