spizzer

He's saying $80M would break the 3rd weekend attendance record.

By the time we get that far, it's unlikely that the 3D shares are still that high plus it'll lose IMAX screens. I think its smarter to use a range in which 100M tickets can be argued, and I'd peg that at high 900s to low 1B.

I think Rentrak has the data, because we get what seems like an accurate annual ticket sale figure on BOM every year (one of the few things that is accurate). They must have numbers for each individual film as well, but there's probably pressure from studios to not report it. Yeah, that's pretty much what they're doing. They have an accurate ticket sale number for a particular time frame (quarter and year) and they just apply the same average price to each film in that frame, instead of evaluating each individual film's 2D/3D splits. As I posted earlier this morning, TFA is at ~52.0M tickets sold if we use the approximate OW ticket price (28% RealD/12% IMAX/7% PLF, sums to 47% 3D overall). Hopefully Deadline or BOM gives us an updated share with tomorrow's actuals. FWIW 52.0M tickets in 10 (or 10.5) days is a record high. Frankly, nothing else is even close, TDK is #2 with 40.4M tickets sold in 10 days. SM1/TA/JW all did around 38M in 10 days.

Must be a typo then.

EDIT: "Doubt it, it says 152-154+"

Doubt it 152-154+. They did the same thing last weekend, for the total they put the Disney studio estimate of 238, but their actual dailies added up to ~245M and they had put in that rival studios were estimating much higher at 242-244+.

Its in the chart right above the Saturday 11:52PM update.

Rth was saying 58M Saturday last night. DHD recently updated Saturday to 59.5M (that happened in the last few hours, definitely wasn't there in the morning). Haven't seen too many Sunday reports yet, but going by the precedent set last week, it should hold better than Disney's estimate. Plus if the Saturday figure is really 58-59M then even the current -15.9% would give us a Sunday figure near 50M.

Did Deadline update again? They're saying 59.5M Saturday right now.

Or we could compare admissions while keeping all of that in mind. That doesn't seem like a crazy idea.

BOM's average ticket price only accounts for the average 3D share for all films in that year. So for example if film A has a 0% 3D share and film B has a 50% 3D share, the BOM average price will assume both had 25%. Now imagine doing this for 100s of films instead of just two. Every film with less than the average 25% share will be underestimated and every film with more than the average 25% 3D share will be overestimated.

That's a much more agreeable notion. With the exception of Frozen, we can say the same thing of HV sales, they're nowhere near what they were in the early 00s, forget the VHS era.

From an economics stand point the first thing we'd do is recognize how drastically different the environment is, which means there's no room for an apples to apples comparison. The entire industry has seen an admissions decline in recent decades, so this isn't some isolated Star Wars problem. From what I'm seeing in your contention with others, you don't seem to be agreeing with or grasping this point, so therein lies the problem.

I don't understand what the basis for this argument is. Are you saying TFA is unimpressive because its going to sell less or the same amount of tickets with double the population? But then wouldn't every film since Titanic be unimpressive, given that the only one that will get close to it is TFA? What's the point of even following the BO then?

When TFA finishes its run and we get 2015 US GDP estimates we can compare the gross as a % of GDP (TPM was .00446, Titanic was .00662). FWIW $1B gross for TFA with a ~19T GDP would be between the two. 1.2B gross would be Titanic level.

Good point.

Are you saying online fees are included in gross? Where's the source for that?

On the high side it will be close to or past 810M by next weekend alone, forget final total.

Plus accounting for Red's report of 50M IMAX gross for TDK would bring it down to ~73.5M admissions.

Actually $10.40 might be low. Here's a quote from Deadline from last weekend: https://deadline.com/2015/12/star-wars-force-awakens-box-office-thursday-night-previews-1201669166/ Obviously this is just from a polled sample, but its still highly suggestive. In order for the overall sample to have spent an average of $10.37 (I was rounding earlier, 10.37 was the estimate) per ticket, the remaining 33% of the sample would have had to have bought their tickets at a price of $0.36, which is impossible. Also, given that the 3D share (RealD + IMAX + PLF) was 47%, that means that a considerable fraction of the quoted 67% were spending that high on 2D tickets. But that number (the BOM average annual ticket price) doesn't assume a uniform/consistent distribution for 2D/3D, OR discount/non-discount, OR morning/matinee/evening across years, it simply uses the actual distribution (which isn't uniform). Example, using $7.50 2D, $9.50 3D, $12.50 IMAX in Year 1, with fixed 3% yearly inflation. Year 1 - 70% 2D, 30% 3D, 5% IMAX. Avg. Price = $8.45 Year 2 - 57.5% 2D, 35% 3D, 7.5% IMAX. Avg. Price = $8.83 (+4.5% inflation) Year 3 - 50% 2D, 40% 3D, 10% IMAX. Avg. Price = $9.34 (+5.7% inflation) Year 4 - 82.5% 2D, 15% 3D, 2.5% IMAX. Avg. Price = $8.66 (-7.2% inflation) The price of each ticket increased a flat 3% every year, yet the BOM calculator would correctly tell us that the average annual price shifted at considerably different rates each year (and even decreased one year, despite the prices actually going up). Both of these can be simultaneously correct. BOM's average price is the amount of dollars actually spent, not the average prices at which tickets were set. For reference, the WSJ prices were from 2011: $7.60 2D, $10.85 3D, $14.05 IMAX. At the time, I assumed small hikes for IMAX 3D and PLF. In 2011, PLF screens were rather limited, and were made up of a larger share of high price seats such as D-Box (which went for >$20 even back then). In today's market, PLF has come to include in house formats such as ETX/RPX/etc. that are not priced as high and should fall somewhere in between 3D and IMAX prices.

Yup. Does anyone know ANH's original run gross? I saw someone mention ~$230M, and that'd around 100-105M tickets. Even that might be doable. But the question then becomes: what is the cutoff for the original run? Because I've heard that there was overlap between that and its first few releases.

No, again, we're looking at an average price for TFA right around $10.00. Titanic sold 128M tickets, so we need closer to $1.3B to match Titanic's admissions. Maybe as low as $1.25B if the 3D share dips low enough.

Hmm. I'm only trying to account for attendance, not adjusted gross. TPM sold 85M tickets in 1999, Avatar sold 75-76M tickets in 2009/2010. Avatar's adjusted gross is obviously higher than TPM's but that's meaningless because it had 3D/IMAX inflation ON TOP of regular yearly inflation. To only account for one of them tells me only half the story. I'm not making any statement as to how much TPM would gross with 3D, because we don't know what the 3D split would be (we can only look at similar blockbusters for possibilities). Nor am I making any statement on how much Avatar would gross without 3D (is the appeal of the spectacle as significant without 3D). But we CAN estimate actual attendance regardless of the presence of 3D. lol yeah this is annoying. Hope that gets sorted out.

Whoops that wasn't meant to quote you Red.

Cool, didn't realize we had an IMAX gross. With 50M from IMAX I get 73.5M tickets sold ($7.18 is the average price in 08 with a small % of IMAX and a very small % of 3D, with discount prices and the like, I have the average 2D price at ~$7.00, average 2D IMAX price right around $13.00). If TFA's 3D share is in the low 40s or below 40% by the time it hits mid 700Ms, it would need 730-750M to pass TDK's admissions.