Box office in a box

For the past few years, Hollywood's weekend box-office tallies have come to represent a tidy bit of wisdom about American culture -- cold, bare numbers relayed around the world every Monday morning that tell us which stories and which celebrities are resonating with the moviegoing public. There is, however, another set of Hollywood statistics of enormous significance, and Tuesday is their day. How important are these numbers? Every Tuesday at lunchtime, Mike Dunn and Peter Staddon, the president and executive vice president, respectively, of 20th Century Fox's home-entertainment division, take the elevator from ther 25th-floor offices at Fox Plaza in Los Angeles down to their cars in the underground parking garage and from there drive out into the noontime traffic on their way to Best Buy, Target, Costco and Wal-Mart. Tuesday is the day new DVD's are released, the day Dunn gets a sense of whether the discs that his team has worked on for months -- or sometimes years -- will sell as well as planned. So the Fox executives wander the aisles of the big retailers. They eavesdrop. They size up the clientele. They take note of what's moving through the cash registers. Tuesday, not Monday, is their day of reckoning.

And in many ways, the same is true for their parent company as well. From about 2002 on, the larger stakes in Hollywood -- the revenue that enables studios to finance blockbusters and to pay Brad Pitt and to keep the lights on -- have come to ride mostly on those little silver discs that go on sale four or five months after a theatrical release. This year, for instance, 63 percent of studio feature-film revenues in the United States will come from movies sold to retail stores; actual box office will generate only 21 percent. According to Tom Adams, a well-regarded home-entertainment analyst whose firm, Adams Media Research, tracks DVD sales and trends, studios often get twice as much revenue from a big film's retail sales as they do from its theatrical release.

Read the article: www.nytimes.com