Box office bomb

In the motion picture industry, a "box office bomb" or "box office flop" is a film that is viewed as highly unsuccessful or unprofitable during its theatrical run, sometimes preceding hype regarding its cost, production, or marketing efforts. Generally, any film for which the production and marketing costs exceed the combined revenue recovered after release is considered to have "bombed".

Gauging the financial success of a film is difficult, and because there is no reliable definition, what makes a "box-office bomb" can be very subjective. Not all films that fail to earn back their estimated costs during their theatrical runs are "bombs," and the label is generally applied to films that miss earnings projections by a wide margin, particularly when they are very expensive to produce, and sometimes in conjunction with middling or poor reviews (though critical reception has an imperfect connection to box office performance).

Causes of a film's failure

Negative word of mouth

Beginning in the 1980s, cinemas started to drop movies that suffered a poor opening weekend. This made the performance of a film on its opening weekend much more crucial to its perception. With the growth of the Internet during the 1990s, chat rooms and websites enabled negative word of mouth to spread rapidly.

Box office

A box office is a place where tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a wicket.

By extension, the term is frequently used, especially in the context of the film industry, as a synonym for the amount of business a particular production, such as a film or theatre show, receives.

Box office business can be measured in terms of the number of tickets sold or the amount of money raised by ticket sales (revenue). The projection and analysis of these earnings is very important for the creative industries and often a source of interest for fans. This is predominant in the Hollywood movie industry.

Etymology

The term is attested since 1786, presumably from sales of boxes (private seating areas in a theatre). The sense of "total sales" is attested from 1904.

A folk etymology is that this derives from Elizabethan theatre (i.e. late 16th century), where theatre admission was collected in a box attached to a long stick, passed around the audience; comparable to "bottle" in Punch and Judy, where money was collected in a bottle. However, first attestation is about 200 years later, making this highly unlikely.

BoxOffice (magazine)

BoxOffice is a film industry magazine dedicated to the movie theatre business published by BoxOffice Media LP. It started in 1920 as The Reel Journal, taking its current name in 1931 and still publishes today, with an intended audience of theatre owners and film professionals.

BoxOffice is the official publication of the National Association of Theatre Owners, a role it took on in 2006.

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