Measuring Entertainment

"Green Day topped the U.S. pop albums chart for a second consecutive week Wednesday, passing the two million sales mark and extending its lead over Eminem during a quiet sales period." - Billboard

Let me start off by saying that I'm glad Green Day is selling so many copies of their new album. I think it's a great album. Let me also say that I like the way that they report album sales... not in dollars, but in people that actually bought the album.

They do the same thing with television (except they usually show it in the form of ratings).

What bugs me is how movies report their sales.

"The inspiration hoops tale, a ripped-from-real life drama starring Samuel L. Jackson as the titular coach, netted $24.2 million from Friday to Sunday." - E! Online

What does that $24.2 million mean? It sure is a lot of money. But is it a lot of people?

The internets say the average movie ticket cost is $6.22 in 2004. So 3.9 million people saw Coach Carter.

But 24.1 million people watched Desperate Housewives last week. And 13.9 million people watched Alias, and that placed 20th for the week. You'd have to go pretty far down the Nielsen list to find the show that just 3.9 million people watched. If a movie was attended by 24.1 million people, it would make $150 million dollars.

Green Day has sold 2 million albums over several months. In movie dollars, that would be $12.4 million... not exactly a blockbuster. Even a blockbuster album, such as Alanis Morrisette's Jagged Little Pill, only sold 16 million albums. In today's movie dollars, that would be almost $100 million (21 movies passed this mark in 2004). In other words, Jagged Little Pill would just beat out The Princess Diaries 2 ($95 million) for number 22 movie of the year.

The other problem with measuring a movie's performance in dollars is that a dollar's value changes with inflation. In 2002, the average ticket price was $5.80. So Coach Carter would've been seen by 4.2 million people vs. 3.9 million this past weekend.

And one more bit of trivia. If American Idol were a movie (and thank God it's not), it would've pulled in $205.3 million dollars last night. That's $200.4 million more than From Justin To Kelly made (which was amazingly seen by almost 800,000 people. At least that would've been really bad for a TV show).