Box office charts are mammoth movie theatre employees. They do one thing and they do it well: count film earnings for all cinema tickets sold. They make good headlines, they’re easy to read and they allow us to make sense of the ever-expanding movie constellation.
Meanwhile, more and more kids in the back — queue-skirters, cinema-goers, late to the pictureshow online streamers, share gifs of their favourite movie moments, debate that actor choice and join the virtual-popcorn-and-fan-theories-throwing community. Surely that must somehow account for a movie’s success.
But the mammoth movie theatre employee is too busy cutting off tickets, counting the money.
Maybe we need a monkey, not a mammoth. Enter Tumblr Fandometrics.
What the mammoth counts and what the mammoth leaves out
Box office ratings count theatrical box office receipts reported in US dollars. Rankings are calculated by time period, from Daily, Weekend, and Monthly, to Quarterly, Seasonal, Yearly and All Time. They can be either domestic for any given country or worldwide. The All Time Worldwide chart is currently dominated by Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Inflation, movie-length and family-friendliness all affect the number by which a movie is ranked in the box office chart. Simply put, shorter movies can be screened more times a day. Also, people usually come watch G-rated films such as Toy Story 4 (2019) in larger groups (also known as families), generating more ticket sales independently of how entertaining the picture actually is.
Thankfully, Box Office Mojo has complied some adjusted rankings for us. For example, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) currently tops the All Time Worldwide list with gross earnings of $936,662,225. However when taking into account inflation it slides down to the 11th position; the rankings are now led by Gone with the Wind (1939).
“Then something went wrong for Faye Wray and King Kong/ They got caught in a celluloid jam/ Then at a deadly pace it came from outer space/ And this is how the message ran” sings a pair of disembodied bloody lips in the opening credits of the weird wonderful cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) (currently on the 606th position in the All Time Domestic (US) box office chart and the 7th position in the Rated R Adjusted one).
For the movie industry it was Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu and other subscription video on demand services that came at a deadly pace from outer space. Apple’s own is expected to land on November 1.
These services changed the way people experience films. And as audiences are exchanging cinema seats for the confort of their own sofa, they are also changing how films are monetised. In many domestic markets, amongst which the US, the UK, Germany and Japan, a recent study by Ampere Analysis found that an average cinema ticket costs more than a monthly subscrition to a SVOD service.
One implication is that worldwide revenues from streaming outlets are set to outclass global box office revenues in 2019, the study forecasts. So what box office ratings leave out is increasingly more important than what they count.
Time for monkey business
Meet Tumblr Fandometrics, the monkey that may outrank the mammoth box office with its ranking skills.
Every week Tumblr Fandometrics tracks the most used Tumblr tags and then turns them as tops by genres, ranging from Movies, Ships, Television, and Gaming, to Anime & Manga, Celebs, Web Stuff, Music, and K-Pop. It also publishes aggregate Weekly and Yearly charts, as well as special editions, such as users’ Oscars predictions or Game of Thornes characters’ popularity.
Whilst still allowing us to indulge in our passion for lists, Tumblr Fandometrics specialises on what box office rankings miss out: the competition for our attention in the entertainment market and fandom return on investment.
For starters, in a world where Netflix and Candy Crush are on the same screen, comparing apples to apples or shiny green candies to shiny green candies is becoming obsolete.
Shiny green candies are now compared with shiny round blue candies or shiny discoball candies (and to lots of other shiny candies that my non Candy Crush player self cannot fathom). The idea is that the lines dividing different forms of entertainment are all but blurred. It’s all entertainment to us. Gone with the Wind in its full 221-minute glory is now competing with Instagram scrolling, Super Mario Bros and Taylor Swift’s questionable knowledge of the London tube.
Tumblr Fandometrics’ aggregate Weekly charts perfectly capture this. The Week in Review ranking for 2-8 September leads with Steven Universe: The Movie, a new Cartoon Network movie and sandwiches Pokemon between tags such as Artists on Tumblr and Good Omens, the Neil Gaiman fantasy book-turned-TV-series about an angel-demon duo trying to stop the Armageddon. It: Chapter Two (2019), the sequel to the 2017 film adaptation of one of Steven King’s most popular novels, which topped the box office rankings for that week, only reached the sixth positon on this Fandometrics list.
Also, movies don’t end with the theatre employee walking down the stairs with a garbage bag. Or at least good movies don’t. They often go on forever in unexpected ways through fandoms, tiny internet pockets with the storage capacity of Mary Poppins’ bag. Here fans develop intricate theories about all sorts of cultural offsprings or just express their admiration in a language seemingly of their own, ultimately building entire worlds. Worlds that box office rankings leave out.
Fandometrics also builds up lists by entertainment genres. And the leader of the 2-8 September Movie Fandometrics is again Steven Universe: The Movie. It: Chapter Two is now on the second position.
Another advantage of tracking film-related is that they reveal a movie’s popularity in wide-screen; that is, in historical context. Movie Fandometrics assess how well new films perform compared to old school giants and cult favourites, which is not too different to how any of us would assess a film independently. For example, It: Chapter Two shares the list with Beetlejuice (1988), which occupies the seventh position, a Tim Burton movie starring ghosts and peak Winona Ryder.
After becoming a less exciting place since 2013 Tumblr is expected to make a come-back. As Tumblr was recently sold to Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, its new owner Matt Mullenweg plans to revive it as the place to find your “online tribe”. So go add Tumblr Fandometrics on your watch list.
