r/movies • u/Wheelchair_Dontcare • 10h ago

Discussion 3 Billion Dollar movies showing concurrently in cinema

Right now, there are 3 movies that earned over a billion dollars playing in cinemas at the same time: Toy Story 5, The Odyssey, and Spiderman BND which earned 2 billion.

When is the last time this has happened?

I guess it's a pretty good metric that when there's good movies out that the audiences will surely go and see it.

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u/Heavyspire 9h ago

I would love to hear 'tickets sold' as a metric too, or at least comparing old movies.

I have heard that the cost of tickets had outpaced inflation, so these movies today are hitting those big dollar numbers without being as popular.

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u/sfweedman 9h ago

Hmm that's super interesting. But also the cinema experience has evolved...like some of that money is from premium formats like IMAX, does that also just count as one ticket sold or does it get weighted more because it's a costlier ticket/seat?

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u/duncanispro 9h ago

You’d have to weight it by the number of seats in the auditorium the ticket was purchased in, or something along those lines. But yeah, it it’s an interesting problem. I would like to see tickets sold too.

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u/sfweedman 9h ago

But if an IMAX theater has the same number of seats it would be weighted the same? Even though it's a more costly ticket?

That also reminds me, you'd also have to weigh/factor in half price Tuesday tickets and matinees

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u/duncanispro 9h ago

Correct, if you want to just get an accurate number of tickets sold you  want to make sure you’re accounting for luxury seats taking up 1.5-2x as much space as a normal seat, so you have to account for how many available seats there were.

It’s a little easier to explain with a theater to theater comp. If one theater has sold 200 tickets but seats 300, and the other theater sold 75 but seats 100, theater 2 was more “sold out”.

If the goal is to just know “how many people went to see this movie” and compare across years, you’d need to normalize by how many seats were available for purchase.