Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Ever try to predict your own grosses?

This is topic Ever try to predict your own grosses? in forum Ground Level at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-17-2008, 10:41 PM:

I always try to predict our weekly ticket sales dollars as soon as I find out our bookings. My rules are, I have to have my prediction in by Wednesday night each week and I'm not allowed to change it once the film opens.

This year my best prediction has been week #2 of "Madagascar 2" - I was only off by $4.75.

My worst was "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" - missed that one by over $1100!

Posted by Kurt Zupin (Member # 2751) on 12-17-2008, 10:50 PM:

When I worked at GQTI me and my friend used to do this every weekend. We would take whats opening and do the same. IT got very heated during the summer lol. It was a lot of fun and gave someone braging rights for the weekend. It was also an easy way to keep track of our opening weekends, we always had an up to date listing of our top movies of all time.

Posted by Ron Funderburg (Member # 4561) on 12-17-2008, 11:10 PM:

When I owned theaters everyone that was working Friday evening would trow a $1.00 in the bucket they would write out their total prediction for box office for that night the person was closest without going over would win the pot. A whole $10 to 15 bucks. We did the same thing with afternoon grosses on Sat and Sun and the night grosses those nights as well. Sat and Sun were split shifts and only the $$$ taken on those shifts were counted. The managers, owners and booth personal participated in a total weekend gross it cost you $5.00 to play (you would get about $40.00 if won) for the total number of people for the weekend.

I have thought about doing something similar here!

Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 12-18-2008, 10:08 AM:

Being a drive-in, we tend to average the same number of "patrons per vehicle" on a nightly basis. I can look at the field, count the cars, and usually get to within $15-$20 of what the actual gross is. This past year with gas prices as high as they were, we saw alot more people in each car as opposed to years past. We don't do carload pricing, we just saw more people crammed into the cars.

My boxoffice and concessions usually run dollar for dollar, so by counting cars on the field, I can usually predict the total nights gross fairly well. My wife keeps up with the year to year trends, and tries to predict the following weeks attendance in order to plan for staffing. She can look back at attendance records for 2 years, add "x" percent to last years attendance numbers to come up with her totals. Most of the time she nails it.