Box Office Receipts

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Imagine your school holds a movie night and charges admission at the door. If you added up every single dollar collected from everyone who walked in to watch that one movie, you would have the total ticket money it earned. That total is exactly what box office receipts means, just done for real movie theaters instead of a school gym.

The name comes from the actual booth at a movie theater, historically called the "box office," where tickets are sold. Box office receipts, sometimes just called box office gross, are the sum of all the money paid for tickets to see one specific movie, whether people are talking about a single opening weekend, one country, or the movie's entire run in theaters worldwide.

What it does not include

It is easy to mix up box office receipts with all the other money a movie makes, but they are not the same thing. Money from streaming, television licensing, toys, or sequels is called Ancillary Revenue, and it is counted separately. Box office receipts only ever means ticket sales in theaters.

It is also worth knowing that a studio does not keep every dollar of box office receipts. Theaters and distributors typically split that ticket money between them, with the theater keeping a cut and the distributor, usually the studio, receiving the rest. So a movie that "made 100 million dollars at the box office" does not mean the studio actually received all 100 million dollars.

Fun facts

• A movie's opening weekend box office receipts get enormous attention because they are usually the earliest strong clue for how the whole theatrical run will turn out.
• Past box office receipts are exactly what people look at when they study comps to judge how a new, similar movie might perform.
• Box office receipts are tracked and reported almost like a running scoreboard, updated week by week for as long as a movie stays in theaters.