Ranking the year's movies

[Mike Blakesley]

I keep a spreadsheet of all our movies every year.

Often, a movie has been opening in mid to late December and carrying over into the next year. So how do I rank that movie?

If I put the whole movie's gross into the year in which the movie is released, it deflates our "grand" total for the next year.

If I split the gross up into the years in which the tickets were sold, that destroys the ranking of the movie for the year.

Maybe I should just give the whole gross to the year in which it was released, on the assumption that usually another movie will be released late the next year and balance things out. That fouls things up a lot if a movie is released Christmas Day and plays for 3 weeks. By rights, a good half or more of that gross should belong to the year following the release date.

Your thoughts welcome. Or do I just worry too much?

[Frank Cox]

I would be inclined to account for the entire week's take at the last day of each week's run.

Simply because the number you're interested in is the total gross for the week and that total gross hasn't finished arriving until the last day.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I guess the "correct way" depends on what you want to achieve with your report. If you want to create a realistic report of your highest grossing movies of the year, then I'd say you account for the "wrap around" at the end of the year, maybe with an annotation of how this gross is split between the two years, otherwise you're not getting the full... picture.

For fiscal and other accounting purposes, specific rules will apply, but I guess this is just for yourself to get a grip on the popularity of certain movies, so I'd say you want to see what a movie made during the runtime.

There are other interesting statistics as the average gross per week of a movie and maybe also how the patronage progressed during the weeks it was on screen... but that might be for other reports.

[Mike Blakesley]

I actually keep 2 spreadsheets. One that has all the data for the year broken down by weeks, and the other one "All-time Boxoffice" that compiles the data from each year. The problem is if I want to rank the movies within each year.

I do tend to credit each full week into the year in which the week started. I mean, you can't split hairs TOO fine. So our #4 movie for 2020 was "Wonder Woman 1984," even though all but the first 6 days worth of sales for that movie fell in 2021.

The most interesting chart is the All-time one. Each film on that list has a number starting from Film-Tech Forums back in 1979 when I started. (Currently at 2554 movies.) Besides the film numbers, the list also has spaced for Rank by Attendance and Rank by Gross. So when a new year starts, I first sort that big list by "film number" order. Then, I pull last year's list (with attendance and gross figures), add it to the end of the big list, and assign new "film numbers" to the new entries. Then re-sort the list by attendance and gross, and update the appropriate numbers in those columns.

That way I can look up any title, and find out where it ranks in our all-time attendance or all-time grossing movies. It's more for my own entertainment than anything, but it does come in handy for the occasional curious inquiries I get.

It's kind of sad to look at our attendance figures going back. Each year since 2022 has had a bit of a decline. Not much of one, but enough to be sad. Some people rave about how lucky we are to have a nice theater in town, but they never actually go to movies.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Personally, I don't think you should over-complicate it, as you have a clear goal in mind. There are always going to be edge-cases, like Wonder Woman 1984. But if the purpose is to see what movie did the most business, then I'd take the rule that the movie will be placed into the year when you first showed it. In practice, that could mismatch with the official release date as you're not playing every movie on release as we know from your planning challenges.

It's really cool you've been doing this since 1979. That's actually quite some interesting statistical information. I'm not sure how secret you deem this data, it's probably not exactly Coca-Cola's secret formula, but still, your data off course. But I'm sure there would be some interest in that if you'd publish that somewhere.

[Mike Blakesley]

I really need to stop using the # symbol at all, I keep getting "Film-Tech Forums" when I meant "number 1."

I wish I had all the data pre-1979. I'd love to know the attendance numbers from back in the early days. I went to work at the theatre in the fall of 1975, and the owners then had been there since 1967. When we bought the theatre, they kept all the records and I'm not sure how much minutiae they kept from year to year anyway.

Our original film booker (Barry Walker) had been booking the place for decades and I'm sure he had records going back. Whenever I'd call his office with a question, his secretary, Rose, would say "let me get your book." When he retired, I still wish I'd asked him to send me our "book."