For decades, Hollywood studio executives, directors, agents and talent have maintained a Sunday ritual: checking box office grosses. These numbers, which leak over the weekend and are sometimes strategically leaked to show momentum (or in some cases, flounder in waiting), form the backbone of the entertainment industry’s narrative driving machine.
Streaming numbers are still in their relative infancy, and TV ratings are now being analyzed using multi-platform warnings. But people all over town still like to argue about box office receipts, even in a turbulent, fast-changing media landscape. It’s part of the reason why influential filmmakers try to get a theatrical release for their films with a 45-day window in theaters — it matters more when a director can open a film at number one, especially for surprise breakthroughs like Ken Parson’s A24. Back rooms And Carrie Parker’s Portrait of Horror mania.
The practice of collecting this revenue from almost every distributor and studio can be traced back to Marcy Boller-Schwartz, who founded what was called Entertainment Data Inc. in 1976 at the age of 23 and made that company the primary arbiter of unbiased box office data. (“All you wanted to know about movies but didn’t know who to ask,” was how the company introduced itself in commercials after its ten-year run, adding details like, “Did Paramount beat Buena Vista last summer?”) The company changed hands several times over the years. It was sold to TV ratings giant Nielsen in 1997, which then transferred the box office unit to Chris Aronson-founded Rentrak Theatrical in 2010 for $15 million. Rentrak merged with cross-platform measurement giant Comscore in 2016, where it existed under the Comscore Movies moniker until late last month.
Anant Gupta, a Bay Area private equity executive who launched an investment firm called Advaya Capital, signed a deal with Comscore in May to buy that box office data unit and turn it into his own company, which will be called Rentrak. He brought on board former Rentrak vet Aronson, who ran distribution for Paramount and Fox, to join the board of advisors for the company, which has 200 employees globally.
The executives behind the deal aim to rebuild, modernize and share the newly rebranded Rentrak Hollywood Reporter Some ideas on how you plan to do this:
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Let’s walk through the logic of the deal. Why are we looking to spin off the historic box office unit of data giant Comscore into its own company in a $70 million all-cash deal?
Anant Gupta: My background, I’m one of the founders of Advaya Capital, we started just over two years ago as an investment firm looking for high-quality assets as well as those where we believe we can help accelerate growth. What we found was a gold standard dataset that provided box office data across the industry for every part of the ecosystem and that was a very small part of a larger organization within Comscore that had to compete for resources within that broader organization. Because of this, there are likely to be things they could have invested in and could have done in order to meet some industry needs that were not implemented.
This deal ends a major merger that took place a decade ago and brings back the Rentrak name, which box office insiders will be familiar with. How did you send the deal to the major studios?
Gupta: Our message to the studios was: “Look, we understand that there are things that this data can be useful for answering questions and helping you guys drive your business, so tell us how we can be better. Tell us what’s working and what’s not working.”
Chris, you’re joining Rentrak’s board from the other side of the box office equation, where you distribute at Paramount and 20th Century. What was your role in getting this deal done and what are you working on now at Rentrak?
Chris Aronson: When I left Paramount, I actually began serving as a consultant to the company from an insider’s perspective, adding my perspective and experience. But the deal itself was not easy, I think. But Anant and his team at Advaya persevered and got the deal done. Rentrak is the gold standard for global box office data, and — I don’t want to say it’s lost that title at all — but we definitely want to improve it and return it to the trusted, impartial third-party processor of all this data. So I’m working with the company to introduce them to the stakeholders that I know and to kind of help pave the way for Rentrak’s future.
When you say it wasn’t easy to get the deal done, does that untangle the assets from the broader Comscore?
Gupta: With any type of carve-out transaction, there are a whole host of things that make the company able to function on its own. And there’s certainly a complexity to some of that, which we’ve had to deal with. But it’s also that we basically put together the plan of what we want to do so that we can start with the kind of activities that we wanted to do to help improve the products and services.
Aronson: The previous iteration of Rentrak was more integrated, if you will, with the studio side because they were really one of the important players on the home entertainment monitoring and measurement side. So there was kind of a fit for Rentrak to get into the theatrical side, which is where I came in. I would just say that because of Comscore’s multi-faceted business, I don’t think the movie division is keeping up with the times, shall we say.
Can you give an example of not keeping up with the times?
Aronson: Well, when we started in 2001 and launched in 2002, box office data was still a very incomplete collection. I don’t remember what percentage of theaters was reported to Nielsen, which was the only player in the space at the time, but I don’t think it was more than 50 percent, maybe at most. Today, Rentrak domestically collects 99 percent and I believe close to 95 percent of its international box office.
It was kind of a seismic shift, but it was a very basic business that Nielsen EDI was running at the time. And then we updated it and went to our customers and said, “Look, we can collect more data, but how do you want to see it displayed?” No one had done that before. So we started, together with our partners, to develop sets of reports that would help them do their day-to-day work and long-term planning for their business. This is just one aspect of data analysis in today’s world.
How much of that is post-game, as in after the movie comes out, and how much of it is pre-game, as far as looking forward to upcoming titles or lists?
Gupta: What we’re talking about is bringing a lot of the latest and greatest tools to help build products and functionality here that can help studios understand their data and understand what’s happening at the box office in a much more granular and better way than has been done historically. This includes different functions within the studio, whether that’s greenlighting the next movie, whether that’s how you spend your next marketing dollar, whether that’s how you think about which screens you’re going to put your film on and which auditoriums and which cities.
I would say that most of the things Rentrak has been doing so far have been focused on post-match type. I think there’s a huge opportunity on the pre-game side, using your kind of terminology here, that there’s a lot more we can do and provide some of that data to help people understand who’s buying tickets. Obviously the way you buy tickets today is very different than, say, 25 years ago, when people would show up at the box office and buy a ticket.
Aronson: Not to mention the number of formatting options available now.
Despite the major disruption in the industry, the box office – especially weekends – is still the shorthand Hollywood uses to announce hits and flops. mania Al-Makhr narrated C Carrie Parker THR “I’m not going to turn off my phone. I’m going to check numbers every moment I can” in those first few days. How do we think about how box office data shapes the narrative and how that has evolved?
Aronson: You stated the truth. It’s still the currency that – I think it’s a little unclear to determine whether it’s a success or a failure, because, as you well know, the economics vary from film to film and it opens the door for a new film. Back rooms At a certain level is very different from opening for a The Mandalorian and Grogu.
But it remains the currency used to judge success or failure. I think New Rentrak’s role is to help shape that story for our clients and be able to give them as much information to help them shape their own story, because it’s really up to them to shape the success or failure story of their films. I believe we are a trusted, neutral third party that wants to provide relevant information to inform them.
Rentrak also mentioned using AI to build predictive box office analytics capabilities. What does that look like in practice?
Gupta: If you can combine some marketing data — how people market their films with what performance, and how that drives performance at the box office — that can be very valuable and help you better predict how your film will perform. But more importantly, it will also help you decide how to allocate your marketing budget, for example.
AI is great at being able to take large sets of information, process it, analyze it, and create results if you know what you’re doing. We have 50 years of experience looking at this data, creating analytics on it, understanding how it evolves, understanding the nuances of the data, where there are gaps or where there can be inconsistencies or anything like that, that can impact the analysis and impact the results, and ultimately, we can bring all of that insight to the studios or to the theater chains.
The major studios appear to be pivoting to a 45-day theatrical window after pulling back a bit during the pandemic. How will this factor into the box office overall?
Aronson: I have long maintained that the lack of standardization of windows was very detrimental to the industry. I think most objective stakeholders would say that before the coronavirus outbreak, the windows were too long. But I think if the industry actually coalesced around a 45-day window, you would see a healthier theatrical environment.
Because one thing about windows before coronavirus was that they were maybe too long, but it worked. There was no expectation that the film would reach home within two weeks. So, the fact that windows became a hodgepodge, I think online was losing sales, whether it was a theatrical ticket or whether it was an at-home transaction, whether it was a streaming subscription. But we’ll definitely help dive into that data.
In May, the largest exhibitor, AMC Theaters, recorded its highest level of attendance, 25.5 million, since May 2019 before the pandemic, when Avengers: Endgame Not shown on screens. Bigger picture, how do you see attendance trends this year?
Aronson: Local theater is a mature business, so it always becomes cyclical in the sense of, are there films that people want to see? I think the most encouraging trend for the industry overall is in the Gen Z and Gen Alpha area where preliminary research shows, especially in Gen Alpha, that this generation wants to put down their devices and wants to spend time with their friends physically and not just in their virtual world, and that movies are a channel that allows them to do that. I think this is a great sign for the future of theatre.
What will it take to reach $10 billion domestic box office in 2027? I also think Rentrak sees this possibility?
Aronson: I think anyone involved in this work has expectations about when a certain period – whether the summer of 2026 or the end of 2026 – will reach a certain benchmark – but it’s always the public that decides. That’s the long and short there.
I would say what’s interesting now is that you have mania and backstages, but you had it too Super MarioAnd you’ve got it toy story Coming in, you’ve got it Minions An upcoming movie and a strong performance with Spielberg’s film. Business thrives when there’s something for everyone, and I think what we’re seeing now is that there are films that aren’t just in the market for one segment of the audience. So, I would say, throw a couple more mania and Back rooms There’s an easy $10 billion.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
