Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Ever try to predict your own grosses?

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Topic: Ever try to predict your own grosses?

Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 12-17-2008 10:41 PM

I always try to predict our weekly ticket sales dollars as soon as I find out our bookings. My rules are, I have to have my prediction in by Wednesday night each week and I'm not allowed to change it once the film opens.

This year my best prediction has been week #2 of "Madagascar 2" - I was only off by $4.75.

My worst was "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" - missed that one by over $1100!

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Kurt Zupin
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 989
From: Maricopa, Arizona
Registered: Oct 2004

posted 12-17-2008 10:50 PM

When I worked at GQTI me and my friend used to do this every weekend. We would take whats opening and do the same. IT got very heated during the summer lol. It was a lot of fun and gave someone braging rights for the weekend. It was also an easy way to keep track of our opening weekends, we always had an up to date listing of our top movies of all time.

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Ron Funderburg
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 814
From: Chickasha, Oklahoma, USA
Registered: Nov 2007

posted 12-17-2008 11:10 PM

When I owned theaters everyone that was working Friday evening would trow a $1.00 in the bucket they would write out their total prediction for box office for that night the person was closest without going over would win the pot. A whole $10 to 15 bucks. We did the same thing with afternoon grosses on Sat and Sun and the night grosses those nights as well. Sat and Sun were split shifts and only the $$$ taken on those shifts were counted. The managers, owners and booth personal participated in a total weekend gross it cost you $5.00 to play (you would get about $40.00 if won) for the total number of people for the weekend.

I have thought about doing something similar here!

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Barry Floyd
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1079
From: Lebanon, Tennessee, USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 12-18-2008 10:08 AM

Being a drive-in, we tend to average the same number of "patrons per vehicle" on a nightly basis. I can look at the field, count the cars, and usually get to within $15-$20 of what the actual gross is. This past year with gas prices as high as they were, we saw alot more people in each car as opposed to years past. We don't do carload pricing, we just saw more people crammed into the cars.

My boxoffice and concessions usually run dollar for dollar, so by counting cars on the field, I can usually predict the total nights gross fairly well. My wife keeps up with the year to year trends, and tries to predict the following weeks attendance in order to plan for staffing. She can look back at attendance records for 2 years, add "x" percent to last years attendance numbers to come up with her totals. Most of the time she nails it.

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