Box Office Receipts Are Misleading

Avatar may have made $77 million domestically this past weekend, but that apparently wasn’t impressive enough for many critics – anything short of breaking any and all records for the first weekend is solidly unacceptable.  But too many of these movie pundits, many of whom are not as credentialed as Roger Ebert, fail to account for even the most basic of variables when comparing numbers.

There is one simple reason why Avatar didn’t have a groundbreaking debut weekend:  half of America’s population was snowed in for three days, too busy worrying about how to remove two feet of snow from their property.  The northern half of the East Coast had a respectably-sized blizzard, and portions of the Midwest had winter weather as well, but this can’t be a reason for one of the most hyped movies since Transformers 2 to not live up to profit expectations for three days, can it?  Those three days couldn’t happen to have the exact same date ranges, could they?

But even if Avatar were to meet or exceed expectations for first weekend sales, any claims that it broke records would be misleading.  Comparing, for example, 2008’s The Dark Knight to 1997’s Titanic requires more math than many of the film pundits are capable of, or are at least interested in, as allowances need to be made for changes in ticket price and dollar inflation – this, however, doesn’t stop them from doing ignoring basic principles of logic.  Titanic made $1.8 billion in 1997-dollars, when a movie ticket averaged $4.59 according to the MPAA.  The Dark Knight made $1 billion in 2008 dollars, with the average movie ticket costing $7.18.  Based on these numbers, and naively assuming all income was based on ticket sales, Titanic sold approximately 392 million tickets and The Dark Knight sold somewhere near 139 million tickets, but they still get ranked in the same lists based on net income.

Even with this built-in assumption and approximation error, comparing the number of tickets sold for movies is far more valuable and realistic than dollars-generated will ever be, and yet the industry persists in this willful mismanagement of data and its perception.  Avatar will do fine, just like all highly marketed and well-constructed movies do (Twilight movies are dark exceptions to this rule), but it isn’t likely to sell the number of tickets that would be required to eclipse the prior domination of James Cameron’s heart-throbbing love flick.

Kyle can be found on his blog, on Facebook, via email, or on Twitter.