The Myth of Box Office Records: Breaking down the success of Twilight

It seems like every time a big movie comes out, it comes along with headlines about the highest grossing opening weekend or the highest ticket sales over some period of time. The problem with this is that the system is working in a way were the number of tickets sold to to win decreases. Think about it, when Star Wars was released in 1977 the average movie theater ticket price was $2.23. Box Office Mojo says today’s average is $7.18, but I wonder how accurate that is since in North Carolina where my family lives, a pretty rural area, it’s $9.25, and here in Seattle it’s $10.50. Even if we stayed with $7.18, that 3.2x. That means that Star Wars had to sell 3.2 tickets to equal one Twilight ticket.

When you start to look at today’s box office grosses, you realize how much that aggregates to. As of October 13, 2009, Transformers was reported to have grossed approximately $402 million dollars in the US, and $430 million abroad. That makes up about $832 million worldwide, topping Star Wars in the record books by a cool $57 million dollars. But what happens when you divide out ticket sales at average prices?

That’s a pretty compelling figure if you ask me. Transformers made $57 million more at the box office, but was viewed less than 1/3 as much. 231,730,587 more people saw Star Wars: A New Hope, yet Star Wars would not hold the record between the two. At today’s ticket prices, Star Wars would have made a cool $2,496,572,949, yea big boy, that’s a B as in 2 1/2 BILLION dollars.

With movie theaters racing to higher ticket prices to try and continue a failing business model, why don’t we stop applauding the relative success of movies using this fuzzy math? I would rather judge a movie by how many of my peers wanted to see it than how jacked up the ticket prices are. Don’t even get me started on Popcorn and Soda.

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