The Weekly Movie Scoreboard : Motion Picture Executives Debate the Value and Accuracy of Published Box-Office Figures

Repeating a seemingly innocent ritual of our time, newspaper and TV reports blared the latest weekend results from Hollywood’s cinematic horse race:

Paramount’s “Fatal Attraction” ranked No. 1 at the motion picture box office, scoring a hot $7.6 million in 758 theaters.

Tri-Star’s “The Principal,” starring Jim Belushi, came in second with a zingy gross of $4.7 million.

Meanwhile, New World’s “Hellraiser,” a grisly horror flick, was close behind, with $4.65 million in tickets sold.

And that’s the way it was on the weekend that ended Sunday, Sept. 20. Maybe.

In fact, movie executives have become embroiled in an increasingly acrimonious--if largely private--debate over both the accuracy and value of such box-office statistics.

In recent years, weekend box-office reports have become a staple of the entertainment media, this newspaper included.

But some film executives claim the widespread dissemination of box-office numbers is pushing audiences toward an unwelcome “win-place-show” attitude toward movie viewing. And that mentality, they say, has at least occasionally driven companies into misreporting numbers to gain an edge on important movie scoreboards compiled by USA Today, Daily Variety, “Entertainment Tonight” and others.

“The jockeying for position has become incredibly intense,” said Thomas Sherak, marketing and distribution president for 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

Sherak added: “(Padding of numbers) happens on occasion. No one can tell you with any certainty when it happens. But it’s usually when pictures are bunched closely in gross.”

Such “bunching” occurred last month when--according to grosses reported by the individual studios themselves--”The Principal” and “Hellraiser” narrowly outsold Fox’s “The Pick-Up Artist,” a romantic comedy that took in about $4.5 million over the weekend that ended Sept. 20.

But executives of several studios have complained privately that Tri-Star’s reported figures for “The Principal,” and to a lesser extent New World’s reported “Hellraiser” grosses, were measurably higher than their own informed estimates for those films--and by just enough to put them ahead of the Fox release.

In reporting grosses for the two movies, the trade paper Daily Variety took the complaints seriously enough to add an unusual addendum that read: “Other distribution sources place totals for these pictures at between $200,000-$500,000 less.”

Daily Variety editor Thomas Pryor would only say that his paper ran the disclaimer in keeping with its practice of double-checking company reports in at least some instances with competitors or others. “We have certain individuals with certain companies who will give us an honest reading. You know the old story: It’s ‘sources,’ ” he said.

Tri-Star distribution chief Jerry Esbin didn’t return calls seeking comment, and Sherak declined to discuss the incident.

New World executives strongly maintain that their company’s numbers were accurate. “Variety never called us (to question the figures), and nobody complained,” added Frank Wright, the New World publicist who is responsible for reporting the independent studio’s grosses.

Ironically, such disputes over the integrity of box-office numbers appear to have become more intense as the gathering of movie statistics became more sophisticated in the 1980s, thanks largely to computerization.

As recently as the late 1970s, individual film studios took as long as a week to telephone theater owners for reports on their grosses--and then disclosed the numbers publicly only for major hits such as Universal’s “Jaws,” which made enough money to send corporate parent MCA’s stock soaring.

According to entertainment analyst Art Murphy, media and shareholder pressure compelled all major studios to begin routinely revealing weekend grosses by 1981.

But the numbers remained rough approximations until several years ago, when Entertainment Data Inc., a Los Angeles company, began electronically compiling nationwide box-office reports on everybody’s movies--and selling them to competitors, who watch each other carefully for signs of padding.

The Entertainment Data reports, showing each weekend night’s ticket sales for each picture in theaters accounting for between 70% and 80% of the total U.S. box office, are delivered to about 100 subscribing film and theater executives (often at home) by 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Sunday and Monday mornings.

Based on the reports, studio executives quickly make sophisticated estimates of total performance of not only their own films but also the movies put out by rivals.

Later on Monday, each studio relays estimated grosses for its own films to reporters from the key entertainment press and television services.

Because the widely available Entertainment Data material is so complete, explained one studio distribution executive who declined to be identified, suspected attempts by studios to boost their own totals at this point--impossible to spot only a few years ago--now tend to “stick out like a sore thumb.” Any inflation in numbers can only occur with regard to the 20% or 30% of the movie market, outside the major cities, that Entertainment Data doesn’t cover.

By Monday evening, “Entertainment Tonight,” a syndicated program with an estimated 18 million viewers, is generally the first to trumpet a quick blurb announcing the latest hits and misses at the box office.

Some film executives believe those blurbs--and similar reports that subsequently appear in newspapers and TV newscasts, thanks to the wire services--have a strong effect on what movies people choose to see.

“It becomes a question of whether you want to go with a perceived winner or loser,” maintained Sherak, who claimed that good films may not get a chance to establish themselves in a crowded marketplace because audiences, like book readers, are increasingly trained to focus on “best sellers.”

Other movie insiders think the scoreboard reports have much less impact on audiences than on Hollywood’s thin-skinned creative community.

“It’s frightening,” one major studio executive said of the pressure to score high on the box-office charts on a movie’s opening weekend. “All the agents and stars say, ‘Hey, where’s my movie? How come I’m not in the top three?’ ”

Murphy, who compiles box-office statistics for Variety, said his own cross-checks reveal periodic “discrepancies” in reported figures. According to Murphy, companies virtually never fake an entire week’s box office total, but they occasionally slip midweek grosses into the weekend totals in order to boost their position in the all-important Monday reports.

“Those things are usually resolved by the peer group,” Murphy said. “A competitor might call and say, ‘Hey, I’ve done this a little myself. But you’re way out of line.’ ”

David Nuell, executive producer of “Entertainment Tonight,” said his show, which gets studio estimates by early Monday morning, has generally avoided accuracy problems by verifying its numbers with a variety of sources, including some paid consultants whom he declined to identify.

“We get studio numbers. But we also get a cross-check. We pay experts to provide us with rankings, and we’ve rarely had a problem,” Nuell said.

If actual padding occurs less often than suspicious competitors believe, some movie executives nonetheless contend that the box-office reports aren’t detailed enough to reflect a film’s true performance.

“It’s very hard to be accurate in a few words or a few seconds,” said David Forbes, president of MGM/UA’s film distribution arm. “In analyzing business on a picture, you can’t select one or two factors. You have to know something about the number of prints, how it was advertised, a lot of things.”

Jack Curry, entertainment editor for USA Today, said he hasn’t heard any studio complaints about his paper’s regular use of box-office rankings. Nor does he have much sympathy for the claim that audiences are learning to pay more attention to the performance of films than the films themselves.

If there’s too much attention to numbers, said Curry, “the studios have fathered it themselves. All of them have set up a weekly apparatus for disseminating numbers. We wouldn’t have any (reports) without them.”