Commentary: Can best picture Oscar nominee 'The Irishman' make money for Netflix? It's complicated
If a movie was released in theaters, you can find its box office reported. "The Wizard of Oz" made $969,000 internationally when it came out in 1939. Type a title into Box Office Mojo and see what comes up.
This is useful information for a few reasons. Here's a compelling one: A couple years ago a study looked at global box office between 2014-2017 and found that female-led films outperformed male-led films at all budget levels. There's a transparency to the data - studios, for example, can't greenlight a slate of movies featuring almost all-male leads and pretend it's smart business.
Box office performance doesn't just influence what movies get made, it can also help shape how we think about any given movie.
"It's rare that you'll have a conversation about a movie without somehow, some way, the box office or the performance of a movie being brought up," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, which compiles box office data.
Would the idea of cult hit even exist if we didn't know that it flopped when it first opened only to be rediscovered at some later point when people found it on TV or at midnight screenings?
