Percentages, People!
From a rather lame editorial in The New York Times, which expresses the obvious:
Only recently have people been required to knowingly cite box office receipts to sound conversant with entertainment news. But money often seems the sole arbiter of credibility in our society. [...]
The key lesson to remember here is that figures alone do not matter. It's how they compare to expectations.
The editorial says that “money often seems the sole arbiter of credibility in our society.” Really? Stop the presses! Come on, New York Times editorial writers, take a stand! Is that a good or a bad thing?
What the movies take in each weekend is meaningless to me, because while the numbers look big, they don't factor in ticket price (raise ticket prices but keep the same amount of people, then obviously your gross will be bigger). I'm more interested in say, the percentage of all movie-goers that went to see Kill Bill: Volume 1. Or maybe the number of people who went to see Kill Bill: Volume 1 as a percentage of the people who enjoy movies in general, the latter number being necessarily larger than the number of people who went to see a movie this weekend, because obviously people have differing priorities from weekend to weekend. That obviously means polling to guage how much people like movies and then asking them which movie they saw recently, but still, it would be interesting to see how many people passed up the latest blockbuster to stay home and snuggle with their honey and watch a video.
