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Given the fact you are reading this article
on this site, you have had a fair amount of experience going
to the movies, but for the sake of being thorough, let’s
walk through the steps. You step up to the box office, you
tell the ticket seller which movie you would like to see and
he or she pushes a few buttons and your tickets print out.
You hand your tickets to the usher, get them ripped and
watch the movie. In 2002, this happened around 1.63 billion
times in the United States alone. That is almost 6 movie
tickets sold for each man, woman and child in the US.
Despite the massive amount of accounting involved with
tracking all the moviegoers going to different movies,
produced by a variety of companies, distributed by a variety
of companies, and exhibited by a variety of companies, all
the grosses are nicely organized by the next afternoon,
sometimes before the average moviegoer hits the snooze
button on his alarm clock.
The person working in the box office starts the process of
creating the data that will later become the box office
charts. They enter in what movie you want and the computer
tracks all tickets sold from their terminal (POS – point of
sales). Companies like Radiant Systems supply many of the
major chains, like AMC and Loews, with the software and
hardware they use to track all their internal sales from
popcorn to advanced ticket sales. With the magic of
networking - hard work and lots of wires - all the terminals
report to one computer and by the end of the night, each
theater knows everything from how much each movie made to
how many medium popcorns were sold to which candy sold the
best during the 7:00pm rush. There was a time before
computers and this description obviously only applies to
recent years and to theaters that employ this system.
From up to
175,000 daily showings and millions of tickets sold,
internal theater networks and databases simplify the problem
down to 5,712 different sources of information. If we lived
in a world of monopolies, it would be a simple task of
adding up the thousands of sites, but those 5,712 theaters
are owned by a multitude of companies that all have to
report to another multitude of companies that distributed
the film. While each theater usually reports back to their
home office with their sales data, there is little
communication between exhibitors. Regal is not about to send
all their sales data to AMC or Carmike’s.
The solution to this problem came in the form of
Entertainment Data Inc. in the mid 1970’s. Marcie Polier
worked at a theater and it occurred to him that instead of
calling up each studio, it would be a lot easier if each
theater could report to one source. This idea worked pretty
well, and in 1997, the mega-company of number crunchers,
ACNielsen bought EDI. ACNielsen was later acquired by the
even bigger VNU, a massive Dutch publishing company that
employs close to 40,000 people and generates $4.3 billion a
year. Just to give you an idea of VNU scope, here’s a few
companies and services it owns: Hollywood Reporter, Golden
Pages (yellow pages), Billboard, Adweek, and other
trade publications.
Theaters call up EDI at the end of the business day and tell
an EDI operator the grosses for each movie. The EDI operator
then types everything in to their database (yes, this sounds
inefficient, but that’s how it is down for now) and after a
few thousand phone calls, the box office grosses are ready
to be distributed to studios, exhibitors and millions of
curious moviegoers.
Lee's Movie Info archives this information and supplements it with other reliable sources.
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