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May 21, 2008

Indiana Jones & The Battle For Dominance In Utterly Irrelevant Hype

One of the ways the very valuable, well-run, helpful internet ticket buying companies are now hyping themselves is to send out weekly reports on their tickets sales. These reports are now regularly reported on websites, including Variety's, and even referred to in Traditional Media.

One problem... they're irrelevant non-information posing as valuable info.

You see, the further any poll gets from an unbiased survey, the less valuable that poll becomes. The least reported on aspect of polling, even in the political season, is how questions skew any survey. For instance, last night, 21% of people in KY said race was important in their voting choice... and only 80% of those people voted for Clinton... this, according to the exit polling. Something is screwy there, unless you have a lot of white people voting for Obama because he's black or the polling is simply wrong. We have no way of knowing.

Polls by ticket-sellers are also skewed... mostly by the vagaries of online ticket sales, none of which are offered as warnings when these numbers are bandied about. I would be willing to bet that more women use the service than men, that parents who are taking smaller kids to the movies use it more than single for matinees, and that bigger cities with theaters that sell out regularly have a much higher percentage of online sales than anywhere else.

So in other words, Sex & The City should be doing big numbers with women who are planning to go one opening weekend in cities where the show had the biggest penetration, which is bigger cities. So on the Fandango chart below, you see a 5-to-1 percentage of ticket sales for S&TC vs Narnia, when there is almost no chance that this weekend’s Narnia box office will total just 20% of Sex & The City’s opening gross.

Likewise, as of the Friday morning Speed Racer opened, it was within 1% of sales of tickets with the second weekend of Iron Man… and did less than half the business of Iron Man that weekend.

And let’s not forget that none of these companies offer actual sales figures, lest we actually analyze their sales figures each week… way too scary.

So why do people keep hyping this “information?” Well, it seems to me that everyone is looking for “news,” even when there is none… and guess what… there is very, very little here… and what little there is gets completely glossed over by not having any real numbers or details about the buyers to work with.

Just sayin’…

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On the eve of the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, MovieTickets.com reports that as of 4:15 p.m. ET, the movie has accounted for 77 percent of its total tickets sold today. Further, the total volume of Indiana Jones tickets sold at MovieTickets.com tripled from Sunday (5/18) to Monday (5/19).

For further information or to speak with a MovieTickets.com spokesman, please contact…

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Dozens of tonight’s midnight shows for INDIANA JONES 4 are already sold-out – while the SEX AND THE CITY movie (opening May 30) is seeing hearty group ticket sales, with indications that female filmgoers might show up at the theater next weekend en masse. (As of this morning, 68% of respondents in our SATC survey say they’re planning to see it on opening weekend with “a group of women.”)

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Posted by poland at May 21, 2008 02:42 PM

Comments

Posted by: repeatfather at May 22, 2008 01:31 PM

Posted by: Chucky in Jersey at May 22, 2008 05:43 PM

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