I haven’t written anything in the past few months - both for personal reasons (switching careers kinda takes a while) and because I’ve been working on building a real website to supplement this blog. It’s taken much longer than I wanted, but I should hopefully have something soon. But I’m now compelled to write at least a quick post.

At some point yesterday, Box Office Mojo, undoubtedly the premier source for movie financial data, completely disappeared. Like, The Leftovers disappeared. (If you click on the link, you’re taken to the IMDb box office page.) This is a huge deal - admittedly personally, in that it is an unrivaled and incredibly rich data source for movies, and so was the perfect source for real movie data analysis - but also for the industry. There are a bunch of articles on the subject - this one has some seriously distressed reactions about it, and rightly so. The film industry is incredibly secretive, or at least insular, when it comes to financial data - see this Wikipedia page on “Hollywood accounting”, an actual term someone made up to soften the idea that Hollywood studios routinely make up numbers to avoid paying those involved (for example, My Big Fat Greek Wedding , a film that reportedly cost $5mm to make and grossed $600mm worldwide, lost $20mm according to the studio). So to lose an entire source of movie financial data - and not only a source, THE source - is, at the very least, a serious blow to those reporting on the numbers, and at most, a worrisome move toward further financial/data-related secrecy in the movie industry.

No one knows yet what will happen to it; IMDb did buy the site years ago, but left it intact. IMDb is owned by Amazon - which seems strange in that the two sites could not seem more unrelated, and doesn’t inspire confidence that they will be as open with the data as Box Office Mojo had been. This is well within their rights - they own the data and can do whatever they want with it - but it’s seriously concerning to anyone relying on the data. But who knows - maybe they’ll have a bigger, better, and more open site, with more advanced analysis, interactive charts, legitimate historical context, and an API. (They may completely replace what I’m trying to do here - but hey, then at least someone will be using the huge amount of data there in a sophisticated way.) Until then, I’d recommend using The Numbers - they track the same data, it’s unfortunately just not as rich (no international data, and historical data is a bit spotty). I’ve been using data from there, and it’s more than good enough unless you need extremely granular or historical data.

(Also, if you’re desperate for a real Box Office Mojo fix, The Way Back Machine preserved it in all its former glory.)