Box office facts for kids

Box office at the Ohio Theatre in Columbus, Ohio

Ticket sales booth, Charing Cross Road, London, England, opposite the Garrick Theatre

Folk festival box office in Edmonton, Alberta

Ticket window at North Port High School Performing Arts Center

A box office or ticket office is where you buy tickets for an event. This could be for a movie, a concert, a play, or a sports game. You might buy tickets at a counter, through a window, or online.

The term "box office" is also used to talk about how much money a movie or show makes. When people say a movie was a "box office hit," it means it earned a lot of money from ticket sales. This is super important in the film industry, especially in Hollywood.

To know if a movie made a profit, you can't just compare its total ticket sales (called "gross") to how much it cost to make. That's because movie theaters keep about half of the money from ticket sales. The rest goes to the movie's distributor, which is often called "distributor rentals."

Why is it called a Box Office?

The name "box office" might have come from the Globe Theatre, which was owned by William Shakespeare. Back then, people collected money for tickets in a special "tudor money box" at the theater entrance.

The term "box office" was widely used by the late 1700s. It likely came from the office where tickets for "theatre boxes" (private seating areas) were sold. By the early 1900s, "box office" was used to describe the total money earned from all ticket sales.

Movie Money Talk

The film industry uses special words to talk about box office numbers. Here are some of them:

Where the Money Comes From

• Domestic means money earned in the United States and Canada.
• Foreign means money earned in all other countries around the world.

When Money is Counted

• Weekly box office usually counts money earned from Friday to Thursday. Most new movies come out on a Friday.
• The weekend box office is a big part of the weekly total. It usually covers Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
• The opening weekend is the first weekend a movie is released. This number is often talked about a lot because it shows how popular a movie is right away.

How Many Places Show a Movie

• Theaters means the number of movie theaters showing a film.
• A wide release means a movie is showing in at least 600 theaters.
• A limited release means it's showing in fewer than 600 theaters. Sometimes, a movie starts with a limited release and then goes wide if it's popular.

What "Gross" Means

• Gross means the total money earned from ticket sales.
• The movie's distributor (the company that sends the movie to theaters) gets a bit more than half of this money. This is called "rentals." The rest goes to the movie theater.

How Popular a Movie Stays

• Multiple is a way to see how well a movie keeps earning money after its first weekend. You divide the movie's total earnings by its opening weekend earnings. For example, if a movie made $20 million on opening weekend and ends up making $80 million total, its multiple is 4. A higher multiple means the movie stayed popular for a long time.

How Many Tickets are Sold

• Admissions means the actual number of tickets sold. In some countries, like France, they mostly report how many tickets were sold, not just the money earned. Websites like Box Office Mojo estimate how many tickets were sold by dividing the total money earned by the average ticket price for that year.

Box Office Lists

You can find many lists about box office numbers:

• List of highest-grossing films: Movies that made the most money.
• List of films by box office admissions: Movies that sold the most tickets.
• box-office bombs or flops: Movies that did not make much money and were considered unsuccessful.

Who Reports Box Office Numbers?

Many websites track how much movies earn. Some popular ones are Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, and BoxOffice. These sites have information on hundreds of movies. It's harder to find complete data for very old movies because tracking methods have changed a lot over time.

How Box Office Reporting Started

• In 1922, Variety magazine started reporting how well movies did in theaters. They wanted to help theater owners know which films were popular.
• Later, Variety began listing the top-earning films each year.
• In the 1960s, computers helped track box office numbers more easily. Variety started publishing a weekly list of the top 50 highest-grossing films.
• In the 1970s, companies like Exhibitor Relations and Entertainment Data, Inc. (EDI) started collecting box office numbers directly from movie studios and theaters. This made the information more accurate and widely available.
• By the 1990s, box office results were often shared in the news, and people started talking more about how well movies were doing.
• In 1998, Box Office Mojo launched online, making box office numbers available to everyone for free.
• Today, companies like Rentrak (which bought Nielsen EDI) collect worldwide box office data.
• In March 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, most movie theaters closed. This caused box office reporting in the US to pause for the first time in 26 years.

Average Ticket Price

The average ticket price (ATP) is how much a movie ticket costs on average in a certain year. It's figured out by dividing the total money from ticket sales by the number of tickets sold.

Distributor's Share of Earnings

"Distributor rentals" are the part of the money from ticket sales that goes to the movie distributor. This is different from how much money a movie makes from selling DVDs or streaming. The distributor's share used to be around 30-40% of the total ticket sales. By 1997, it averaged about 43% for big studio films.

See also

In Spanish: Taquilla para niños

• Box office territory
• Box-office bomb
• Film industry
• Hollywood accounting
• List of films by box office admissions
• List of highest-grossing films
• List of highest-grossing non-English films
• Lists of box office number-one films
• Lists of highest-grossing films
• Will call