Every week, Canadian news sites such as “Canada.com” or “thespec.com” give us huge box office numbers related to the weekend’s movie releases. What they don’t tell you is that these“numbers” do not refer to Canadian box office, rather North American box office. In fact Canadian box office revenue accounts for less the 6% of the North American total. At least this is the case according to tribute.ca, and variety.com box office results for October 29th’s #1 box office hit Saw 3D. So the question remains why aren’t Canadian news organizations telling us this information? And furthermore why are these numbers so drastically different?
Many would say population would be a significant factor as the United States has 310,232,863 and Canada only has 33,759,742 according to www.internetworldstats.com. Another explanation could be the Halloween weekend, not as many people go to the movies. Yet with more digging we discover that this is not an “isolated event” according to CBC the national box office from the entirety of 2009 was 1.01 billion which set a new record, yet on the opposite side of the border according to TIME magazine the United States box office exceeded 10 billion dollars. This staggering 9 billion dollar difference proves that Americans go to the movies a lot more than Canadians do. I feel that these news sites prefer to go with these “North American” box office numbers because they are merely larger numbers. In the news bigger is better, I just feel that it should be clearly stated that these are “North American” numbers, and not Canadian numbers. As for whether or not Canadians or Americans go to the theatre more you can clearly see that more Americans go to see movies than Canadians. Yet if you look at in terms of population it would seem that close to the same population “percentage” go to see movies. Which means that say 30% of Americans see a movie, 30% of Canadians may also go out and see the same movie, but because 30% of Americans are a lot bigger population than 30% Canadians the American box office will earn more money.
If Canadian news companies went through more of an effort to display Canadian box office results the new Canadian filmmakers would have more of an idea about how much their movie may earn. This information would also been extremely useful for Canadian, and American film bloggers so that they may interpret how popular a film is in a particular country. Just because a large American audience enjoys a film, does not mean a large Canadian audience will, and vice versa. All it takes is a little bit more effort, and this effort could change Canadian movie Entrepreneurship for the better.
http://www.tribute.ca/movies/boxoffice/
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=b_o_layout&dept=Film
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2010/01/13/canadian-box-office.html
http://www.canada.com/entertainment/index.html
http://www.internetworldstats.com/america.htm
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1951371,00.html
