When The Phantom Menace was released in 1999, George Lucas found himself on expectations-management duty. Questioned about whether the prequel would beat Titanic as America’s all-time box-office No 1 film, he dispensed Jedi wisdom: “This is not a contest. Our society makes everything adversarial.” He predicted, meekly, that The Phantom Menace would gross more than Jurassic Park but less than ET.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens torpedos US advance ticket sales record Read more

Could he have looked forward another 16 years, Lucas would have realised he had it easy. JJ Abrams surely knew he’d be vying with the dark side of Star Wars hype if he took on the franchise. But you suspect even he didn’t anticipate the Force-choke of expectation currently tweaking his trachea regarding The Force Awakens’ box-office performance (as if restoring the series’ quality wasn’t enough). If he fails to steal Avatar’s $2.8bn crown as the most successful film ever, Abrams will be given about as sympathetic a treatment by certain entertainment news websites as one of Darth Vader’s spluttering minions. (By the way, Mr Vader, it’s worth considering that no sequel or prequel has ever been the US’s or the world’s highest-grossing film.)

Something has happened in the movie world since the late 90s. Box-office speculation has a serious case of hypertension. There has never been more pressure to break records. In 2015 so far, four films have grossed more than $1bn worldwide. This was cinema’s four-minute mile, back when The Phantom Menace was trying to break through the barrier. Yet one of the 2015 members of the $1bn club, Avengers: Age of Ultron, the sixth highest-grossing film ever, was reportedly deemed a failure by Disney executives because it didn’t beat the box-office total of the first Avengers film. Spectre has been subjected to similar feverish hectoring about failing to live up to Skyfall, which in 2012 grossed nearly twice as much as the nearest previous Bond movie.

At the beginning of the year, there was a burst of speculation about whether, on the back of a number of resurgent franchises, 2015 would break through the current $11bn ceiling and become the biggest ever year at the US box office.

The internet, says Forbes box-office analyst Scott Mendelson, has been the kerosene on this bonfire of the box-office vanities: “It’s the nature of having a bazillion different entertainment news sites that need a consistent flow of content that people will read. It’s an easy narrative to say Movie A will be the biggest movie in the studio’s history, or of this year. And then it’s doubly easy to say, ‘Why didn’t this movie perform? Something must be wrong.’”

He sensed the SEO knives being sharpened for Spectre early. “A headline like: ‘Why Spectre is a huge hit but won’t make as much money as Skyfall’ isn’t going to get as much traffic as ‘Can the 007 franchise be saved?’” In this rush to feed the anticipation for hits, very few news outlets treat box-office data rationally, in terms of “the ebb and flow of the market”, Mendelson says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chewbacca, left, and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which is predicted to gross $2bn. Photograph: Lucasfilm via AP

Mendelson says that this state of perpetual anxiety kicked off with The Dark Knight in 2008, which convinced mainstream news outlets such as Forbes that there was “money to be made” in covering geek-centric culture. Given that superhero films were spearheading the industry in financial terms, this meant a boom in box-office speculation – fanned by the horde of digital newcomers.

David Poland, one of the first online box-office specialists, dates the shift slightly earlier, and says the studios had a direct hand in creating what he describes as a “clusterfuck”. In May 2006, wanting to get publicity for their films on the influential news aggregation site Drudge Report, Sony fed early numbers for The Da Vinci Code to the iconoclastic showbiz reporter Nikki Finke. She made box-office curtain-twitching one of the selling points of her new Deadline Hollywood blog. The Drudge Report, to which Finke had links, brought the stories to a wider audience. This, reckons Poland, was the moment when box office data crossed over from the province of industry insiders to internet parlour gossip. “Now people cover it without much awareness of what it is, or how it works,” Poland says.

This new climate often damages the studios, by creating unrealistic levels of expectation. Disney, thinks Poland, tried to dampen chatter in the mainstream media – especially their favoured outlets, such as Entertainment Weekly – about The Force Awakens’ box-office performance. But, fundamentally, Hollywood is implicated in the wider process. “The studios would prefer this box-office sport not exist,” says Poland. “But given that it’s there, and it’s not going to go away, because you can’t make it go away, they’re working it. And they work it very effectively.”

Co-opting a movie’s financial performance for the purposes of publicity is a trick that dates back to the 70s. The Exorcist, Jaws and, most dramatically, Star Wars awakened the US box office from a period of relative dormancy – each busting through the $200m barrier that had long seemed impervious. The dominant mainstream form that emerged was wedded to box office performance, down to the name itself: “There were images in the trade newspapers of people queuing around the block to see them,” remembers Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Rentrak. “The box office was manifested in a visual. That’s where the term ‘blockbuster’ came from.”

Box office-as-publicity became systematic after Tim Burton’s Batman managed a colossal $40.4m opening weekend in 1989. First-gen blockbusters such as Star Wars opened comparatively slowly and built substantial grosses over long runs. But “Batman taught Hollywood that if it had a movie everybody already wanted to see [in advance], you could make so much money, it didn’t matter if was any good”, says Mendelson. The ensuing obsession with putting bums on seats in the first 72 hours of a film’s release created a culture that fixated on and exploited box-office numbers for publicity – especially first-weekend figures.

Batman taught Hollywood that if everyone wanted to see a movie in advance, it didn't matter if it was any good

This tactic resulted in the need for built-in “preawareness”, met by today’s clutter of adaptations, sequels, remakes and reboots. The Batman franchise proved a master of the dark arts of the debut-weekend smash-and-grab, setting the US record four times: for Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and The Dark Knight.

Hollywood has been dancing with the devil in the media moonlight ever since. It goes way beyond the fight for bragging rights of being the week’s No 1 movie. Leaks of pre-release tracking (early estimates based on demographic analysis) to the press, as for The Da Vinci Code, have become common practice. Sometimes for disingenuous purposes by studios seeking to undermine a rival.

“Everybody knows it’s not really in their interests to take down another studio,” says Poland, “because then you get taken down the next week.” But it still happens, whether by deliberately over-inflating expectations, or by pre-emptively establishing the idea of a film as a flop – as befell the Tom Cruise sci-fi extravaganza Edge of Tomorrow in May last year. Early reports of a $25m debut established the narrative, says Mendelson, of “Tom Cruise having a flop; or Tom Cruise being beaten by a girl [Shailene Woodley in The Fault in Our Stars]. Which incidentally is a sexist narrative.” The $178m film, which was comparatively innovative for a blockbuster, story-wise, opened weakly indeed ($28.8m) and eventually took $369.2m, only just making its costs back once prints and advertising are factored in.

The studios have become dependent on smoke and mirrors to entice filmgoers. We’ll never know the true financial picture in Hollywood, because it doesn’t want us to. “There are no DVD numbers and never will be,” says Poland. “There are no VOD numbers and never will be. You don’t see hard numbers for anything else in the film business because they’ve turned [opening-weekend gross] into a marketing tool.” Poland doesn’t believe, as some do, that box-office auditing based on ticket sales, rather than the more manipulable dollar count, would provide an accurate picture of studio finances. It might, though, put an end to some of the current chicanery.

Part of the reason for Hollywood’s caginess is the intensity of the 21st-century blockbuster environment, and the guile needed to survive in it. The last 15 years have been a period of explosive box-office growth, and if there is more pressure to break records, it’s because so many have been broken. True game-changers such as Titanic and Avatar are still once-a-decade events, but the bar moves upwards more quickly now. Ten years ago, there had only been two $1bn-grossers: Titanic and LOTR: The Return of the King. Since then, another 21 have crossed the mark, with a possible two more (Spectre; The Force Awakens) to do so this year. $1.5bn, as attained by The Avengers, Furious 7 and Jurassic World, is the new $1bn. Realistically speaking, The Force Awakens should become the third $2bn-grosser.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Disaster movie … pre-release predictions that the Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow would flop became a self-fulfilling prophesy in 2014. Photograph: Warner Bros Entertainment

$1.5bn, as attained by The Avengers, Furious 7 and Jurassic World, is the new $1bn

Beneath this box-office elephantiasis, it’s not hard to sense anxiety – about whether it will last, and who will benefit if it does. Much of the growth has been driven by cinema-building in developing markets such as China, Russia and Mexico, but there is no guarantee that this building will continue. It is possible that these younger markets will become saturated and stagnate, as the American box office did through much of the noughties. In fact, the US box office dropped sharply last year, which could be why 2015 was talked up as a bumper year at such an early stage.

That, and the frightening implications of China’s Brobdingnagian box-office spurt. China is due to become the world’s biggest film market by the end of 2017, meaning Hollywood’s fate will no longer be in its own hands. Jonathan Papish, boxoffice.com’s analyst for the country, says he can see early signs of a fever there, too: “Tracking is only just starting to develop in China and predicting is still hard to do well. But studios usually trumpet any new record their movies break, usually through an official Weibo or WeChat account. Since every year at the Chinese box office is seeing tremendous growth, records are broken nearly every month.”

Perhaps the best soother for Hollywood would be to concentrate on the quality of its output. Equipping movies chiefly for impact in their first three days has been “incredibly detrimental” to their quality, thinks Mendelson. Intelligent box-office reporting – spotlighting the complicated set of variables by which a movie sinks or swims, and not making cheap comparisons – can also play a part in moving things beyond opening-weekend mania and towards well-conceived, responsibly budgeted projects. “Box office isn’t poker, it’s blackjack,” says Mendelson. “Movies aren’t always competing against each other, but they are always competing against themselves.”

• This article was amended on 1 December 2015. The original erroneously stated Jurassic Park and The Phantom Menace grossed $1bn, and that Gone With the Wind grossed $198m on their original theatrical runs. This has been corrected.





