I am not a film maker in any way. So then why do so many news sites tell me about how much money the film has taken in during its first weekend, week, etc…?
As a film fan / viewer, why should I care?
Any sort of historical explanation would be very appreciated.
I think it’s simply because people want to feel like they’re in “the biz” So rather than talking about how good something is, they talk about how much money it makes, how many people did something, what’s the revenue. It also is a bit hard to quantify “A good movie” but it’s SIMPLE to quantify a “popular” or “revenue generating” movie (At least in terms of revenue). So rather than discussing the movie itself we now discuss “how popular it is”. Kind of sucks in my opinion because all it means is “Other people like it”. It’s like the social media of news stories. Then again you don’t want to like something that isn’t popular, do you?
But I mean it probably comes down to "Variety did it so it was the news of the industry, and then others did it and didn’t notice a change in readership (or saw a positive change) and so they did it more.
I think it’s more the people in the industry that use it as a metric.
How many people do you know that know what random movies generate at the box office? Most people tend to describe it as “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it”.
It’s like other forms of art- most people don’t know what a Monet goes for at auction, they only know if they like Monet’s pieces (if they even know that much.)
It doesn’t even mean that, it just meant that they anticipated liking it and payed movie theater money to watch it. It could, by another metric, be seen as a flop or bad movie. Especially when it comes to opening weekend revenue because all that means is their advertising worked and got butts in seats for the first 3 days it was out.
Excellent point that’s absolutely true. It means “Marketing worked” (at least early on)