Box Office Mojo is an American website that tracks

box-office A box office or ticket office is a place where ticket (admission), tickets are sold to the public for admission to an event. Patrons may perform the transaction at a countertop, through a hole in a wall or window, or at a Wicket gate, wicket. ...

revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of product (business), goods and services related to the primary operations of a business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some compan ...

in a systematic,

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

ic way. The site was founded in 1998 by Brandon Gray, and was bought in 2008 by

IMDb IMDb, historically known as the Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and biograp ...

, which itself is owned by

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

History

Brandon Gray began the site on August 7, 1998, making forecasts of the top-10 highest-grossing films in the United States for the following weekend. To compare his forecasts to the actual results, he started posting the weekend grosses and wrote a regular column with box-office analysis. In 1999, he started to post the Friday daily box-office grosses, sourced from Exhibitor Relations, so that they were publicly available online on Saturdays and posted the Sunday weekend estimates on Sundays. Along with the weekend grosses, he was publishing the daily grosses, release schedules and other charts, such as all-time charts, international box office charts, genre charts, and actor and director charts. The site gradually expanded to include weekend charts going back to 1982, grosses for older films, an international section expanded to cover the weekly box office of 50 countries, international release schedules, as well as box office results from up to 107 countries. In 2002, Gray partnered with Sean Saulsbury, and grew the site to nearly two million readers. In 2003, a subscription model was introduced (Premier Pass) to limit certain data and features to subscribers. From 2002 to 2011, Box Office Mojo had forums, which had more than 16,500 registered users. On November 2, 2011, the forums were officially closed along with any user accounts and users were invited to join IMDb's message boards. The IMDb forums were closed on February 20, 2017.

Acquisition by IMDb

In July 2008, the company was purchased by Amazon.com through its

subsidiary A subsidiary, subsidiary company, or daughter company is a company (law), company completely or partially owned or controlled by another company, called the parent company or holding company, which has legal and financial control over the subsidia ...

, IMDb and the Premier Pass features and content later became free. On October 10, 2014, all traffic to Box Office Mojo was redirected to IMDb's box office page, before returning the following day. On October 23, 2019, Box Office Mojo unveiled a significant redesign resembling IMDb, and was rebranded as "Box Office Mojo by IMDbPro". The redesign was heavily criticized for being difficult to navigate and moving much of its content behind a

paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content (media), content, with a purchase or a subscription business model, paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their website ...

. Several features previously provided for free—such as box-office data for franchises, genres, actors, filmmakers, distributors, budgets and inflation-adjusted figures—were moved to

IMDbPro IMDb, historically known as the Internet Movie Database, is an online database of information related to films, television series, podcasts, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and biograp ...

, the subscription service of IMDb. On March 31, 2020, though, certain features that were locked behind the paywall were freed. These include the brand, franchise and genre lists, which were put under an "Indices" section.

References

External links

* {{Film box office Amazon (company) acquisitions 2008 mergers and acquisitions Film box office American film websites Internet properties established in 1998 Online film databases 1998 establishments in the United States

History

Acquisition by IMDb

See also

References

Further reading

External links