Box office

About this archive

U.S. box-office figures begin at the theater door: a ticket is sold, the exhibitor reports it, and a private measurement service (today Comscore, in the line that runs back through Rentrak and EDI) compiles a comparable daily and weekend tape. Studios then release selected totals to the trades—especially Sunday estimates and weekend chart headlines—because those numbers are publicity. The complete panel is not.

Box Office Mojo (IMDb) and The Numbers (OpusData) publish much of that compiled tape on the web and license the underlying series. Access is rented, not owned. A subscription is permission to use their files during the term; it is not a dump you may keep, complete, and republish after the term ends. Systematic copying of those sites is not allowed, and we do not do it.

This section is an independent archive of figures that have already appeared in public: trade reports, studio notes, newspaper accounts, and other sources that printed a number in the open. Weekend totals—particularly for the No. 1 film—are often available that way. A full Monday-through-Sunday series for every title, every week, is not. Midweek days, later “actuals,” theater counts, and the long tail of the chart rarely leave the industry feed.

The result is incomplete by design of the market, not by accident of this page. It will likely remain incomplete. We are outside the contractual flow that produces the official tape, and we will not scrape the sites that rent it. Gaps, partial weeks, and estimate-versus-actual mismatches are documented rather than filled in. Treat what is here as a public-record compilation: sourced, uneven, and honest about what the industry does not release.

Release-year figures are as reported; inflation-adjusted figures use the CPI, not movie-ticket prices. A film counts in full on a person’s total, not a split share. Cast lists in this book are the names we packed, not a complete billing.

See how the archive is fillingcoverage of weekends and every day of the week

Sources we compiled from, each for a piece of the public record: Wikipedia and Wikidata (weekend number-ones, year and all-time lists, credits, some lifetimes); JP’s Box-Office (U.S. calendar dailies); Box Office Guru (weekend charts); Deadline (estimates, actuals, daily splits); Variety (trades, including historic charts via the Internet Archive); The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, Screen Daily, Screen Dollars, Collider, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, and Forbes (recaps); Grokipedia (some lifetimes when an encyclopedia infobox was empty); U.S. CPI-U via the Minneapolis Fed / BLS (inflation). We do not scrape Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, Comscore, or IMDb.