go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Occasions and Holidays Drive Movie Box Office Sales, Not Advertising

Taking the top box office results for each of 52 weekends from the past 10 complete years (1998 – 2008; Source: IMDB.com) we see consistently that occasions like Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving show increased movie going activity. People have more time during these holidays to go to the movies and Valentines is a date+movie occasion. Also, during the summer, many people go to the movie theatre to escape the heat so there is an overall hump every year during the summer months — from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

People go out during Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving. And they still spend what they planned to spend — 2 tickets for movie — they didn’t buy 2 more tickets and see a second movie on the same date or holiday weekend.  If they had several good movies to choose from (often, they don’t), they would choose to spend the finite dollars on the one movie they really wanted to see. The overall movie spending “pie” did not increase much, if any, year over year.

1998 $4,055,194,733 n/a

Movie advertising, which runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has failed to noticeably increase the overall spending year-round or even during specific times. The chart below shows the differentials (difference between an annual line and the 10-yr average line). These all hover closely in the +$50M and -$50M band. The amplitude of the 10-yr average (red line) is larger than $50M in the summer hump — implying that the average change in movie ticket sales due to normal seasonality is larger than the change in amplitude caused by ALL movie advertising combined.

And the summer “hump” is due to actual demand (people going out to movie theatres, some to escape the heat) not due to advertising. The only effect of advertising is to share-shift from one movie to another — the total spending remains consistent and even seasonal variations are consistent — a “zero-sum game.”

All-Time USA Box office

Source: IMDB.com

Rank	Title	USA Box Office
1.	Titanic (1997)	$600,779,824
2.	The Dark Knight (2008)	$533,316,061
3.	Star Wars (1977)	$460,935,665
4.	Shrek 2 (2004)	$436,471,036
5.	E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)	$434,949,459
6.	Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace(1999)	$431,065,444
7.	Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)	$423,032,628
8.	Spider-Man (2002)	$403,706,375
9.	Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)	$380,262,555
10.	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King(2003)	$377,019,252
11.	Spider-Man 2 (2004)	$373,377,893
12.	The Passion of the Christ (2004)	$370,270,943
13.	Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)	$367,614,540
14.	Jurassic Park (1993)	$356,784,000
15.	The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)	$340,478,898
16.	Finding Nemo (2003)	$339,714,367
17.	Spider-Man 3 (2007)	$336,530,303
18.	Forrest Gump (1994)	$329,691,196
19.	The Lion King (1994)	$328,423,001
20.	Shrek the Third (2007)	$320,706,665
21.	Transformers (2007)	$318,759,914
22.	Iron Man (2008)	$318,298,180
23.	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)	$317,557,891
24.	Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull(2008)	$317,011,114
25.	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring(2001)	$313,837,577

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