For decades, Hollywood studio execs, directors, agents and talent have have kept up a Sunday ritual: Checking box office grosses. Those numbers, which dribble out over the weekend and are sometimes strategically leaked to show momentum (or, in some cases, flops-in-waiting), form the backbone of the entertainment industry’s narrative-driving machine.
Streaming numbers are in their relative infancy and TV ratings are now dissected with multiplatform caveats. But around town people still like to argue about box office grosses, even in a fast-changing, disrupted media landscape. It’s part of the reason why filmmakers with leverage try to get their features a theatrical release with a 45-day window in cinemas — it matters more when a director can open a film at No. 1, especially for surprise breakouts like Kane Parson’s A24 hit Backrooms and Curry Barker’s horror pic Obsession.
The practice of collecting those grosses from nearly every distributor and studio can be traced back to Marcie Polier Swartz, who founded what was called Entertainment Data Inc. in 1976 at the age of 23 and built that company into the primary arbiter of neutral box office data. (“Everything you ever wanted to know about films but didn’t know who to ask,” was how the firm billed itself in trade ads ten years into its run, adding specifics like, “Did Paramount outgross Buena Vista last summer?”) The firm changed hands a few times over the years. It was sold to TV ratings giant Nielsen in 1997, which then flipped the box office unit to the Chris Aronson-founded Rentrak Theatrical in 2010 for $15 million. Rentrak merged with cross-platform measurement giant Comscore in 2016, where it remained housed under the moniker Comscore Movies until late last month.
