The End of Box Office
Illustration by Fergus Campbell
In October 2019 the subreddit r/boxoffice was flooded with users lamenting the overnight transformation of Box Office Mojo, a website that has for more than twenty years tracked the grosses of theatrical releases, in the U.S. and abroad. The site grew popular for its detail: week-by-week “showdowns” between related films, studio market share, inflation-adjusted rankings. Box-office fanatics (among whom I count myself) treasure these statistics, which had disappeared in the course of Box Office Mojo’s overhaul, executed by the site’s owner, Internet Movie Database, itself an Amazon property. Some features went behind a paywall; others were abandoned. The director Edgar Wright and the Forbes reporter Scott Mendelson tweeted complaints.
A tradition had been lost, for a small sect of analysts, but moneymaking continued. The holiday season provided its usual sugar rush of strong multipliers and shared riches, from Oscar bait to franchise behemoths. And then suddenly Box Office Mojo’s fate looked like an omen. Data had become harder to find; in the spring, when theaters closed, it ceased to exist. I started thinking about this piece six months ago, when the peg was Universal and AMC’s agreement on 17-day theatrical windows. Soon Disney moved the Pixar feature Soul, a near-certain box office hit, to Disney+. Two weeks ago, WarnerMedia did the worst, announcing its entire 2021 slate would be available day-and-date on HBO Max, the struggling streaming service, and in theaters.
WarnerMedia’s bombshell came from Jason Kilar, the new chief executive, who is expected to quickly build a content bank for a debt-addled parent company. AT&T stocks were goosed in the wake of the announcement, but the strategy’s execution might not be so easy. Legendary Pictures financed most of Dune, a high-profile 2021 release, and they will probably sue, over contracts structured around box-office grosses. The same goes for stars and directors, one of whom—Dune’s Denis Villeneuve—published his discontent in Variety. Kilar classified the decision as Covid-dependent, and pledged allegiance to theaters, calling them the locus of “some of my most transcendent experiences.” Disney made no mention of changes to theatrical plans for presumed Marvel blockbusters at an investor conference that was sensational for its streaming focus.
It’s clear the studios are hedging their bets. For now, any defense of exhibition must be read as performative, when proclaimed in the midst of streaming investment. At this point, chains like AMC and Cinemark have minimal leverage in negotiations—they’re just staving off implosion. Over the summer, optimistic pundits envisioned a post-pandemic filmgoing public whose habits generated smaller opening weekends and longer runs, a return to the pre-Jaws era. That prediction dissipated as multiplex re-openings were delayed or cancelled and potential test cases dropped off the calendar.
Box office is for many reasons doomed in a Covid-free world. Cinemas have staked their business models on exclusivity, betting that ticket-buyers will not wait three months—the previous minimum exhibition period before streaming availability—to see a film they care about. AMC might survive the truncated window (which will no doubt expand beyond Universal titles), but likely with locations closed en masse. Independent exhibitors, lacking AMC’s resources, cannot depend on whatever money a film earns before appearing, in no time at all, as a five-dollar rental or on HBO Max’s homepage.
Remember when Little Women coasted on a holiday opening to many bountiful box-office weekends? Remember when Rise of Skywalker’s half-billion domestic total was considered a disappointment? Strange is the feeling of longing, for the hiccups and high points in the American theatrical landscape. Sure, mid-range fare that once sustained even the biggies has been conquered by Netflix, as Warners realized with its blighted 2019 crop, full of promising star vehicles, biopics and comedies, but it was still possible for lower-budget features to thrive, and their success depended, as it always has, on a mix of marketing, talent, intuition and cultural import so much defter, clearer, and in many cases luckier than that of pictures destined for discovery with a TV remote.
Box office attends Hollywood as a guarantor of accountability. Its truths are intricate and democratic, and they reflect a kind of homey capitalism, formed out of commitment and passion, even fandom. Until last October Box Office Mojo’s interface had remained low-key, tired enough for an update, perhaps, but happy to prioritize accessible information over optics. Long ago the American film industry got lucrative enough to allow for that information to develop; the biggest rushes for analysts often come from big numbers, accumulated in days—opening-weekend records—or over time, with small weekly declines. Every studio signed on, abided by established practices, and understood that they couldn’t cover up a flop.
In September, Warners revealed sad grosses for the opening weekend of Tenet, but bundled in a fourth day (Labor Day) to pad the total, without really saying so, and hasn’t replaced estimates with actuals. The move shows how quickly a standardized system of reportage can break down. Netflix has never disclosed grosses from limited releases of its awards contenders, probably because some of them were impressive. Every streamer will tailor its viewership numbers for Wall Street, which might mean they won’t be comparable. (Preposterously, watching two minutes of a film or episode on Netflix currently constitutes a “view.”) What happens to leverage, on the part of talent or consumers, when it doesn’t come from easily readable box-office performance?
It’s not hard to imagine a data sphere whose headlines are derived, in five or ten years, from theater-specific sellouts in places like Los Angeles and New York. Maybe Avengers-esque brute force won’t be considered impressive, if no other kind of movie runs in theaters. Festivals might take on mythic status, as fleeting ecosystems of silver-screen overload.
If the industry has reached a cliff edge, it is one that will sever us irreparably from a theatrical legacy, constructed out of countless films’ grosses, qualified only by inflation. Box-office junkies should promise to ignore whatever figures streaming services might inconsistently and unreliably make known, and swear to laugh at their bloat and gloss. WayBack Machine, the internet archive that has collected snapshots from the old Box Office Mojo, will comfort me in my reminiscence, of waking up on Friday, and then Sunday, and seeing how everything actually played out.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer and junior at Columbia College in New York.
