Destroy All Monsters: Box Office Mojo No Go

Did you know that Box Office Mojo was owned by the IMDB? I didn't; at least, not until this past Saturday. What about the IMDB: did you know they were owned by Amazon? Another one of Saturday's lessons.

There was quite a nice small-focus fracas on the weekend as movie geeks (at least, those with a stake in the financial performance of feature films) had a 24-hour freakout about the unexplained disappearance (and equally unexplained reappearance) of boxofficemojo.com.

I was about halfway through re-watching Godzilla on Saturday afternoon when I popped open my laptop to compare the film's domestic gross against its worldwide, and found out that Box Office Mojo was gone. Some variation of that afternoon's activity - the handy lookup; the quick contextual comparison of a movie and its marketplace, during a period of box office metamorphosis unlike any we've seen in our lifetimes - is something I have probably done three times a day for the last five years.

As such, I was disproportionately relieved to see the site reinstated. I had only just begun the vertigo-inducing peek into the canyon its removal would have opened in the way I manage my interest in movies. Needless to say, the experience was unsettling.

Look, I'm not an idiot; I know that anything we consider "free" on the internet is not free, and never has been. We've been fuelling the largest and most lucrative marketing databases in human history through our "free" use of Gmail and Facebook; Wikipedia remains a free resource, albeit one that begs for spare change every nine months to stay operative.

I have to admit I never put any real thought into where BOM's funding was coming from. I probably should have. For one thing, there's a difference between an agnostic information resource and one that's owned by Amazon.com, something which we'd be wise to bear in mind when dealing with the IMDB from now on, too. Amazon ain't in this to clarify the supporting cast of Night of the Hunter for the next generation of American movie fans; it only wants to sell you the blu-ray.

More troubling, beyond this: this company (and its sub-companies) have us. What are we going to do, boycott the IMDB and demand free and equal access to information for all? As the Box Office Mojo shutdown brilliantly proved, these are one-of-a-kind resources that are here on borrowed time.

There's no alt box office reporting web site to which we can flood in Box Office Mojo's absence, just like there's no Pepsi to the IMDB's Coke. They've got us. What their overseers choose to do with them is beyond our input. We either use the tools as Amazon decrees we use them, or fuck the fuck off.

Now, I realize I'm talking about niches within niches here. For most people, movies don't matter; for most people for whom movies do matter, the box office doesn't matter.
For most people for whom the box office does matter, the box office doesn't even matter that much. Like the Oscars, the weekly box office box scores are like an ever-running side bet / self-validation tool, a method for film fans to compare their likes and dislikes against the consensus.

But, like the Oscars, those of us who take the numbers seriously know exactly how seriously to take them. They're a compass, not a map. They indicate of-the-moment, crowd-sourced responses, but one must assemble context, context, context to begin to assemble those responses into a trend.

As such, it isn't the Weekend Estimates on boxofficemojo.com that tend to draw me to the site; it's the charts of, for example, how Godzilla (2014) performs against - well, for argument's sake - Destroy All Monsters on the worldwide stage that interest me. Cross-clamping data can be a risky business, especially the further back you go, because the hailstorm of other influencing elements in any movie's financial performance tends to get lost over time. But as a weird little offshoot of my weird little film fandom, it's something I enjoy doing.

And here's why: as I've argued before, filmgoing as we know it is bubbling towards a crisis point, and we are watching it happen right now, and particularly on web sites like boxofficemojo.com. This summer's domestic box office returns are a fascinating story about how and where the movie market might be reaching its final, blockbuster saturation point. Compare that information against the worldwide returns for the same group of movies, and an even more fascinating direction emerges, one which will genuinely transform the nature and content of "mass" movie entertainment all over the world, whether Hollywood is footing the bill or not.

The recent Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 2 kerfuffle only underlines the inevitable functional crack, as content that used to be defined as only one thing ("it's a movie!") starts to trickle into other potential definitions ("it's digital content!" "it's a mega-screen IMAX experience!" "wait guys, it's both!") to varying levels of success.
In that extent, even Box Office Mojo is eventually going to become obsolete, because the stage of the game that the web site tracks - movies, released in movie theatres - is going to increasingly become just one thin slice of an ever-migrating pie.

Maybe this is what the IMDB and Amazon were trying to preemptively weaponize on the weekend, even if only as a test case: for the changes in moviegoing that are happening right now, Box Office Mojo might be one of the most valuable data resources in the world. And resources don't come free.

Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and popular culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on twitter.