Talk:Box Office Mojo/Archives/2020

Per-screen average

Whatever happened to Per-screen average figures on BOM? Back in 2010, BOM still showed how much money a film was making per screen during any given day, week, or during its entire run. All that's left now is "theater averages", which only refers to the number of theaters where it plays.

If it was removed as a category, I think it should be mentioned here. --2003:EF:13DB:3B43:8D:4201:B0A3:E2B9 (talk) 03:13, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Please help me sir Oinam Abungcha (talk) 09:57, 26 January 2020 (UTC)

Harry Potter fail

Box Office Mojo frequently makes mistakes but they aren't usually notable enough to get coverage by reliable source and be included in the article.

Talk:Harry_Potter_and_the_Philosopher's_Stone_(film)#Billion_dollar_club_and_Box_Office_Mojo

A recent example is the claim that the re-release of Harry Potter brought the total box office gross to over $1 billion, but they later revised their figures downwards. When it comes to examples of them changing their figures after the fact you aren't likely to get an example more noticeable than this was, but they make small mistakes all the time.

More information about Box Office Mojo double counting

If you want to be generous you could say Box Office Mojo does the best it can with the information that is available. Either way they make a lot of mistakes, and I think it should be noted and I would definitely add it to the article if reliable sources actually covered it. -- 109.77.192.162 (talk) 14:18, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Here an IMDb employee offers an explanation for the double counting:

The cause of these problems is that distributors are inconsistent when reporting data for re-releases; sometimes they start counting gross-to-date from zero, and sometimes they start reporting it from the last known value, even if it was decades ago. Sometimes they use the re-release date and sometimes they use the original release date, and what they choose to do varies by distributor/area/week. Box Office Mojo keeps track of grosses/GTD starting from zero for each individual re-release in each area, which many distributors don't do themselves, so it's often a case of us having to deduce concrete figures via heuristics based on limited data, intent, and history.

The situation is acute at the moment because with COVID-19 there's a glut of re-releases around the world dominating the charts and industry is scrambling with ad-hoc auditing and reporting procedures. We've got extra processes and reports in place now and will keep an eye on the Wikipedia page for future cases that you find, but until the industry stabilizes we're likely to see more new cases on top of the internal backlog we're working our way through.

I believe this counts as a primary source citable under WP:ABOUTSELF, although there may be NPOV concerns in bringing up the double counting in the first place (unless we can find a third-party RS that discusses it). Nardog (talk) 23:02, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Maybe rather than emphasizing the many failures we might do better to include this as small explanation of their methodology. It might be worth explaining to readers that it is not as simple as it might seem, it is not like reporting statistics like sports news, but that they have to work from much more unreliable inputs. -- 109.77.201.32 (talk) 15:36, 2 September 2020 (UTC)