Box office

The title of this article is ambiguous. Further meanings are listed under Box Office (disambiguation) .

Box office of a cinema in Hawaii .

Box Office ( English / US- Americ . Coll.; Analogously translated counter booth ) originally referred to the ticket office at the entrance of a theater or cinema. In a figurative sense, the term is used for the box office result, the income that a movie generates in the cinemas during its playing time.

The name box office originated in England in the 16th century at the time of the Elizabethan theater when the entrance fees (coins, mostly pennies ) were collected by assistants in simple clay cassettes (English: box ), which had only one slot but no further opening. The protected from unauthorized access as containers were into the game (English: in an office Office ) brought, where they smashed under the eyes of the responsible manager and the contents were then counted. The sum of the receipts recorded in the box office measured the success of the performance then as it does today.

The opening weekend (or opening weekend ) receives special attention , as a new movie that has been started often attracts the most visitors on this weekend. This income is often used to decide about the further season of a film. Many distribution contracts now have a clause that obliges cinema owners to continue showing a film if the box office results exceed a set limit that weekend.

According to the US service Box Office Mojo , on average, slightly more than half of the gross box office results published there go to distributors as rental fees , while almost half remains with the cinemas. The figures for the domestic market (“Domestic”) include Canada as well as the USA. Production and marketing costs are financed from the rental rent . A direct comparison of box office results and production costs therefore has only limited informative value about the financial success of a production, especially since it can also generate income from video and television marketing.

A film whose grossing results are below expectations is called a film flop ("Box Office Bomb").

In Germany, the success of a movie is announced based on the number of visitors. Here the Filmförderungsanstalt publishes hit lists based on the information provided by the distribution companies. In addition, the market research institute Rentrak (until 2009: Nielsen EDI ) records box office results and visitor numbers from cinema operators and offers this data to subscribers, especially (specialist) magazines, for a fee. In cooperation with the Association of Film Distributors (VdF), Media Control determines the official German cinema visitor charts.

See also

• Box Office Bonus
• List of successful films

literature

• Horst von Hartlieb , Holger von Hartlieb, Mathias Schwarz: Handbook of film, television and video law. 4th revised and expanded edition. Verlag CH Beck , Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-43523-8 , chap. 153.

Web links

Commons : Box Office  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Lumiere database of film attendance in Europe
• Market data and film hit lists from the German Film Funding Agency (from 1986) (annual overviews as individual PDF files)
• Box Office Mojo database of box office results for American films (English)
• The Numbers database of grossing US films

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Josh Loeb: Mysteries unearthed in Shoreditch excavation of Shakespeare's Curtain Theater . November 10, 2016. Retrieved October 6, 2019.
2. ^ Globe Theater Box Office information on BardStage.org
3. ↑ Box Office Mojo: About Movie Box Office Tracking and Terms , accessed November 22, 2012
4. ↑ Media Control - Kino bei media-control.de, accessed on February 2, 2015