This is from Slate, the online magazine. My apologies if someone else has already posted it. I found it really interesting.


Gross Misunderstanding

Forget about the box office.

By Edward Jay Epstein


The media, by treating the box-office grosses released on Sunday afternoons as if they were the results of a weekly horse race, further a misunderstanding about the New Hollywood. Once upon a time, when the studios owned the theaters and carted away locked boxes of cash from them, these box-office numbers meant something. But nowadays, as dazzling as the "boffo," "socko," and "near-record" figures may seem to the media and other number fetishists, they have little real significance other than to measure the effectiveness of the studios' massive expenditures on ads.

To begin with, the Sunday numbers are not actual ticket sales but "projections" furnished by Nielsen EDI, since the Sunday evening box office cannot be counted in time to meet the deadlines of the morning papers. Variety, to its credit, corrects the guess estimates on Monday with the actual weekend take. Yet even these accurate numbers leave in place four other confusions about who earns what.

First, the reported "grosses" are not those of the studios but those of the movie houses. The movie houses take these sums and keep their share (or what they claim is their share)—which can amount to more than 50 percent of the original box-office total. Consider, for example, Touchstone's Gone in 60 Seconds, which had a $242 million box-office gross. From this impressive haul, the theaters kept $129.8 million and remitted the balance to Disney's distribution arm, Buena Vista. After paying mandatory trade dues to the MPAA, Buena Vista was left with $101.6 million. From this amount, it repaid the marketing expenses that had been advanced—$13 million for prints so the film could open in thousands of theatres; $10.2 million for the insurance, local taxes, custom clearances, and other logistical expenses; and $67.4 million for advertising. What remained of the nearly quarter-billion-dollar "gross" was a paltry $11 million. (And that figure does not account for the $103.3 million that Disney had paid to make the movie in the first place.)

Second, box-office results reflect neither the appeal of the actual movies—nor their quality—but the number of screens on which they are playing and the efficacy of the marketing that drove an audience into the theaters. If a movie opens on 30 screens, like Sideways or Million Dollar Baby, there is obviously no way it can achieve the results of a movie opening on 3,000 screens. And how do studios motivate millions of moviegoers—mainly under 25—to go to the 3,000 screens on an opening weekend to see a film no one else has yet seen or recommended? With a successful advertising campaign.

Studios spend $20 million to $40 million on TV ads because their market research shows that those ads are what can draw a movie's crucial opening-weekend teenage audience. To do that, they typically blitz this audience, aiming to hit each viewer with between five to eight ads in the two weeks before a movie's opening. The studios also spend a great deal of money testing the ads on focus groups, some of whom are wired up to measure their nonverbal responses. If the ads fail to trigger the right response, the film usually "bombs" in the media's hyperbolic judgment. If the ads succeed, the film is rewarded with "boffo" box-office numbers.

Third, the "news" of the weekend grosses confuses the feat of buying an audience with that of making a profit. The cost of prints and advertising for the opening of a studio film in America in 2003 totaled, on average, $39 million. That's $18.4 million more per film than studios recovered from box-office receipts. In other words, it cost more in prints and ads—not even counting the actual costs of making the film—to lure an audience into theaters than the studio got back. So while a "boffo" box-office gross might look good in a Variety headline, it might also signify a boffo loss.

Finally, and most important, the fixation on box-office grosses obscures the much more lucrative global home-entertainment business, which is the New Hollywood's real profit center. The six major studios spoon-feed their box-office grosses to the media, but they go to great lengths to conceal the other components of their revenue streams from the public, as well as from the agents, stars, and writers who may profit from a movie.

Each of the major studios, however, supplies the real numbers to its trade association, the MPAA, including a detailed breakdown of the money they actually receive, country by country, from movie theaters, home video, network television, local television, pay television, and pay-per-view, which is then privately circulated among the six studios as "All Media Revenue Report." (To see these private data click here.)

These numbers tell the story. Ticket sales from theaters provided 100 percent of the studios' revenues in 1948; in 2003, they accounted for less than 20 percent. Instead, home entertainment provided 82 percent of the 2003 revenues. In terms of profits, the studios can make an even larger proportion from home entertainment since most, if not all, of the theatrical revenues go to pay for the prints and advertising required to get audiences into theaters. (Video, DVDs, and TV have much lower marketing costs.)

This profit reality has transformed the way Hollywood operates. Theatrical releases now essentially serve as launching platforms for videos, DVDs, network TV, pay TV, games, and a host of other products. Even so, the box-office totals are losing their traditional influence. Up until a few years ago, the results from the U.S. box office largely drove secondary markets, especially video. If a film had a huge opening, the video chains would order 200,000 or more copies (at $60 or more apiece wholesale) for rentals. But this buying formula ended when consumers began buying DVDs at mass retailers. By 2004, Wal-Mart was accounting for more than one-third of the studios' revenues in video and DVD.

For merchandisers like Wal-Mart, DVDs are a means to lure consumers, who may buy other products, into the store. The box-office numbers are of little relevance (especially since it's teenagers who create huge opening weekends, and they cannot afford to buy more profitable goods like plasma TVs). Instead of box-office results, merchandisers look for movies with stars such as Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, who have traction with their highly desired older customers. For example, whereas the sophisticated mind-bending love story Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had a dismal seventh-place finish in the box-office gross sweepstakes—earning a mere $8.1 million for the theaters during its opening weekend—thanks to the presence of recognizable names like Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, it did extremely well on DVD, selling more than 1.5 million copies during its first week in the stores.


Edward Jay Epstein is the author of The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood

No link of the article?

Sorry, well I happen to still have the article up in a window:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2118819/

Thanks for the article Wanderer. Please supply a link and just a synopsis next time though. It's unfair that the article writers don't get the traffic. : )

Good article, but he is a little off the mark.

In his aim to show that the box office means nothing, he kind of rants a bit, and almost purposly manipulates numbers.

Still a good read ... 20-80 % revenue Theater vs DVD ... I honestly don't see how that is possible. Your talking what ... 6-8 Billion in ticket sales last year? That is just a guess but it should be in the right ball park .. he is saying that DVD last year pulled in 24-32 Billion Dollars .....

I don't buy it.

He has a book he is promoting:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... 8&v=glance

His premise is that DVD is now a bigger revenue stream than theatrical and that hollywood is selling far fewer tickets then it did back in 1947. He fails to mention that ticket sales are at their highest since the 50s (highest in the TV...Video...Cable....Video games...Internet era).

dvds are selling better. but he is definetely misleading people with his arguments.

Not to mention his discussion of a movie at the top is terribly flawed.

Studios tend to get about 75-80% of the gross back over the first 2-3 weeks depending on the contract ... it notmally lessens week to week and by the latter weeks the theaters are getting 75-80%. It all varies movie to movie based on what the contract signed looks like.

yup .. the 55% does not count. his assessment of marketing is also something thats most true for only the first weekend usually. From there, WOM plays a massive role too. Not to mention fan bases and stuff. He's really simplified his arguments.

Did everybody see that I did post the link? Yes, he does seem to have an agenda, but it doesn't seem to be an insidious one. I think most of the major points seem pretty solid, about how home entertainment is becoming bigger than theater business. I mean, we already knew that. What I didn't know was how the money is broken up and distributed along the way. I'd been seeing posts referencing how much more a movie had to make before it can really turn a profit, and I was curious to know the hidden costs that had to be taken into account. I thought this article was addressing those costs, and also showing where the revenue was coming from Statistics can always be manipulated and skewed, but I don't think anyone can argue with the overall trend.

The trend is correct. Home theatre is doing much better now than box office .. or well almost.

but more tickets are being sold as well as compared to previous decades!! his breakdown of revenue and how its distributed though is not right though.

I have no way of knowing whose numbers are wrong or right myself. But what would be this guys' motivation for misleading with these figures? A personal axe to grind?

Not really. I think its
a) Misinformation.
b) An avoidance of displaying information that does not cater to his argument. Look how he openly spoke about the costs associated with making a movie for the big screen but nothing about the cost of dvds. he completely ignored how much of the revenue goes to a retailer.

So you think he's just skewing the data to make his point more dramatically?

i think the 20 80 ratio is just ... plain simple incorrect.

I think hes witholding information to make his point seem more valid and dramatic.
I also think hes being naive about some of his calculations like the theatre/studio breakdown. I don't think hes doing this intentionally. I really do think he believes thats how the breakdown is. I don't think he realizes that studios have a say if they want a larger percentage during the first few weeks (which is the time when most of the money is really made nowadays).

What he's doing isn't really new. It's done all the time to lend support to arguments, even around here.

Haha true.

But what I'm doing is not new either. Picking on him and trying to discredit some of his arguments : )

I would agree with you but your logic is flawed oh brown one.

oh multi ethnic confused individual. How so?

What it all boils down to is that somebody's going to have to come up with new definitions for "flop" and "blockbuster."

agreed. People use the word flop and bomb even when the movie ain't.

Good article. wanderer, didn't know you are MyNameHere at OW.

55% is a safe average; Sure a studio may get 80% in weekend one; but how about in week 8 when its getting 25%?

To be honest Baba i think your trying too hard to be critical of an article which isn't quite as misleading as you make it seem.

Yes, well I had trouble registering in both places! I finally got a reply for my first OW login request yesterday! And I think that was 2 weeks ago that I tried to join. I finally had to use my work email so now I'll probably get fired (really I would love to get fired [-o< )

A few years ago, I would have said yes.

But michael, think about it. A normal movie multiplier to be considered good today is 3!! From that perspective, the 55% seems kinda low to me. A few years ago, it was 4.5 back in the mid nineties, it was in the mid 5s. Back then, the 55% seemed appropriate. In week 8, its 25% but in week 8, the movie also took in less than 2% of its total gross. : )

Also, i can't remember who psoted that adrticle here recently but it was interesting ... it remarked on how much the big studios are able to bargain a cut for themselves.