Hollywood’s Box Office Boom Comes With 248 Million Missing Tickets
By Brooks Barnes and Christine Zhang
Hollywood’s summer — by its accounting — was a triumph for the ages. Ticket revenue was not only the highest since 2013, but the second highest of all time.
Just don’t look too closely at the math.
The movie industry ranks box office results by the raw dollar total, without adjusting older figures to account for rising ticket prices. It is the simplest method and, not incidentally, the most flattering.
But when you do an apples-to-apples comparison, translating older box office totals into today’s dollars, Hollywood’s summer loses some of its shine.