Since when does the audience care about box office revenue?

I’ve seen movies you wouldn’t believe….

There was a time, not even that long ago, when the average moviegoer couldn’t tell you what a film made on opening weekend, let alone what its production budget was or whether it needed to recoup international P&A costs in its third fiscal quarter. In 2025 we’ve got people with anime avatars posting spreadsheets and breakdowns like they’re auditing a Fortune 500 company.

You’ve probably seen them – engagement farms on Twitter, like Pop Crave, constantly spamming us with updates about box office takings. At first we all kind of ignored it, then, once it proved to generate engagement, it’s slowly transitioned into the norm for movie reporting.

Take Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s latest film. A bold, original concept from a talented director. It hit early film festival circuits to applause and thoughtful write-ups praising its creativity and ambition. And yet, when it opened to modest ticket sales, it didn’t take a long time for engagement farms to pivot towards box office and begin sharpening their steak knives.

What mattered most to the discourse was its failure to “make its money back.”

But then something weird happened. People saw Sinners. And they liked it. Like, actually liked it. It was emotional. It was strange and it tried something. And slowly, despite the angry tweets and the unhinged comment sections, audiences came around. The film didn’t explode at the box office overnight, but it found its crowd. It lived and it breathed.

In the end I’m not exactly too sure when we pivoted to becoming masters of accounting, but I’m pretty sure I know why we did.

Somewhere along the way box office became a proxy for worth. Not just financial worth, but creative, cultural, even moral. If a film bombs, well then, I guess it’s because it deserved to. If it makes money, it must be “right.” We’ve turned the ledger into a litmus test for our own personal opinions. Microsoft Excel has become the front lines of a culture war; and ‘art’ is losing.

I’m often reminded about the incredible VICE YouTube series, “The War On Drugs”. Every episode ends with the ominous warning, “drugs are winning”. It feels like this with movies and the dark side of the internet.

It wasn’t always this way. We didn’t used to care. The average person didn’t step out of the cinema and say, “That was a moving exploration of grief and identity, it’s a shame it underperformed in key Asian markets.” Today unfortunately that’s the norm. We’re all expected to be analysts, not audiences.

I don’t recall ever caring if Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze recouped its production costs. I spent most of my time instead doing the running man in front of a mirror screaming, “Go ninja, go ninja, go!” hoping that one day I could be as cool as Vanilla Ice.

To be fair it feels like part of the blame lies with the internet; specifically, social media and YouTube commentary channels. Creators, desperate for clicks, attention and a burning desire to quit their 9 to 5’s, learned that outrage and binary thinking perform better than nuance. “This movie FLOPPED and here’s why” isn’t just a headline anymore - it’s become an entire genre.

The problem is these takes don’t exist in a vacuum. The average viewer sees a title like “Why Birds of Prey Failed” and assumes the film itself must be a failure. Never mind that it’s a colourful, inventive, character-driven rollercoaster with a fantastic ensemble and killer choreography. The dominant narrative becomes “It didn’t make enough money” and that’s supposed to be the end of the discussion.

If box office was the ultimate metric, then Blade Runner would be a cautionary tale. It was a commercial disappointment. Critics at the time were lukewarm, calling it slow, confusing and overly stylised.

Roger Ebert famously called it a “failure of storytelling”.

And yet today it’s a pillar of science fiction cinema, arguably one of the most influential films of the 20th century. Entire generations of filmmakers point to it as foundational. It basically invented neon-lit techno-noir, and every third cyberpunk aesthetic you’ve seen owes it a debt.

Ghost in the shell, Akira, Bubblegum Crisis, The Fifth Element and so many other franchises were dependant on its existence, and they all found their roots in spite of the movie’s lacklustre sales.

Starship Troopers? Same deal. Critics didn’t get it and initially it was labelled a bomb. But with time, people began to see what Paul Verhoeven was doing; the satire, the critique of militarism, the sheer absurd brilliance of its world-building. It’s not just a cult classic now, it’s a text. It inspired video games, essays, fan theories, even academic papers.

Nobody even talks about the books – every piece of Starship Troopers media you’ve seen in the last 20 years can trace its visual design back to a single source; a crazy fever dream, a movie put together by an insane dutchman in the midst of a cocaine high that everyone initially wrote off as pop trash.

Let me tell you, box office means nothing.

And so here we are, decades later, teaching it in film classes and quoting “Would you like to know more?” like it’s scripture. It spawned comics, games, even a weirdly loyal cult fanbase that quite often get a little too carried away with the fascism part. Financial success? No. Cultural footprint? Massive.

And then there’s Fight Club. A box office underperformer that critics either hated or completely misunderstood. Today, it’s a cultural touchstone (for better and for worse). Try making a list of the 100 most discussed films of the last few decades and Fight Club will be on it. Probably sandwiched somewhere between The Godfather and 2 Fast 2 Furious.

I’m old enough to remember the reviews at the time. They ranged from “narcissistic frat-boy nonsense” to “possibly dangerous,” before becoming the movie your edgy university friends wouldn’t shut up about as they chewed their gums at early Sunday morning come-downs. It found its audience in DVD sales and late-night screenings and now it’s a generational touchstone. Whether you love it, hate it, or just think it’s overrated, it mattered.

None of these films were “winners” by financial standards. But their impact? Massive.

So why have we become so obsessed with the money?

Some of it is just internet rot. Everyone wants to be the first to call a hit or a flop. It’s sports commentary for the nerd set. Movies have become teams and the box office is the scoreboard. If you’re Team Marvel or Team Snyder or Team “Everything Disney Does is Woke Garbage,” then box office stats become ammo. Movies no longer need to even be good or bad, they just need to invoke someone using the meme of that smiling dog with the words “U mad?” written above it. Box office has become the bolts in an internet troll’s quiver, used with great effect to remind you that the thing you love is actually trash and you should probably just go and “KYS”.

We’ve come to revel in the chaos. Box office takings have morphed into a year-round version of the NBA All-Star weekend’s dunk competition.  We’ve replaced curiosity with tribalism and spreadsheets.

And it’s costing us.

Good movies are being buried before they’ve had a chance to breathe. Directors who take risks are punished for not hitting four-quadrant demographic checklists. Studios get scared and, ultimately, creativity suffers. Because if the only metric that matters is money, then why make anything challenging or new?

In the case of Sinners it feels like a turning point; it was like watching the internet lose its grip on the conversation, if only briefly. The noise from the engagement farms was still there, but people tuned it out. They saw the movie and then they started talking about the story. They shared their thoughts without parroting clickbait. It felt like the old days.

All of this leads to an interesting point.

What can we do?

The obvious thing is to stop treating box office numbers like a Rotten Tomatoes score with dollar signs. They’re not a verdict on quality, they’re a snapshot of marketing, timing and luck. If a film interests you then you should probably just watch it. Don’t wait for the internet to tell you if it’s “worth it.” If we keep outsourcing our opinions to financial reports, we’ll keep getting the same safe, risk-averse content over and over again.

Ever wondered why Robert Downey Jr is being aired out to dry and shoe-horned into the Dr Doom costume? Because it’s safe. Because when Marvel did take risks with movies like Shang-Chi and the legend of the 10 rings we listened to the internet and never even bothered. Great movie btw.

Second, support stuff that takes risks. Even if it’s flawed. Even if it’s weird. Actually, especially if it’s weird. Weird needs your ticket money more than franchises do, because algorithms don’t reward originality. Amazing movies like Everything, Everywhere, all at once only exist because some producers are so awed by the art itself that they’re willing to risk it all on finding an audience. Thank god they did, they gave us one of my top 5 movies of all time.

Third, resist the impulse to turn every release into a tribal battle. A film isn’t good or bad based on who likes it. We don’t need to treat box office flops like moral failures or hits like validation of personal politics. Art doesn’t need to win a culture war to matter.

This of course will fall on deaf ears, but it still needs to be repeated and shouted loudly from the highest mountaintops.

Because we fix this by remembering why we cared about movies in the first place - not because they made money, but because they were fun and exciting.

As 10 year old me was dancing in the mirror, rapping the words to a song about mutated green turtles bashing borderline-racist caricatures of ninjas over the head with nun-chucks, nobody else existed in that moment except me and the movie.

I was being transported to a plane of existence where the only audience member that truly mattered was an audience of one….me. And that’s because art is subjective; yes, even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of The Ooze is art, because the media itself transcended the concept of dollar value.

I could have been the only person in the world who watched that movie and cared, and that feeling, more than ever, is what we miss when we make our judgement calls based on the values listed on a spreadsheet.

Box office can’t measure any of that.