Analysis: An Update to International Tracking

July 8, 2015

Since launching our international box office tracking back in November last year, we’ve had a tremendous response to the new service. In additional to comprehensive tracking for select films, which we’ve been steadily expanding, we also now publish complete weekend charts for Australia and New Zealand, with more countries coming soon.

As part of our continued effort to make our tracking the best in the business, we’re making a modification to the way we calculate international totals.

Our totals for studio films are now derived from a variety of sources. For the films we’re tracking on a comprehensive basis (ones like Jurassic World, The Avengers: Age of Ultron and Inside Out), we gather figures reported to us by the studios, plus reports from about 20 local film boards (including the major territories like China, the United Kingdom, South Korea etc.). The local data helps to fill in box office total for countries that a given studio either doesn't report on at all, or which the studio reports on only for the first few weeks of a release. As I described in my original article, this helps make sure we have the most complete and accurate tracking for every film.

Since countries outside the United States report in their own local currencies, we have to make some decisions on how to convert those figures into dollars. For that, we use the most recent exchange rates reported by the United States Federal Reserve. The studios mostly appear to do the same thing, so our numbers and the studio numbers for each weekend track very closely, in general.

Cumulative grosses for each territory are trickier, though. For those, one has to decide how to handle the fluctuating exchange rates. A couple of examples from the run of Furious 7 illustrate the dilemma.

First, the International Box Office, Analysis