Box Office Mojo

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Box Office Mojo began on the 7th of August 1998, when a man named Brandon Gray sat down to predict which ten films would make the most money at American cinemas that coming weekend. He was not a studio executive or a trade journalist. He was running a website, and he wanted to see if his guesses were right. To check, he started posting the actual numbers after each weekend passed. That act of self-accountability turned into something far larger than a forecasting exercise.

  What questions drove Gray to keep going? How does a one-person predictions column grow into the definitive public record of Hollywood's earnings? And what happens when the internet's most trusted box-office archive gets absorbed by one of the world's largest corporations? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Building the Record

  ›

  By 1999, Gray had expanded beyond weekend estimates. He began sourcing Friday daily grosses from Exhibitor Relations, posting them publicly on Saturdays so that anyone with an internet connection could see what each film had earned the previous day. Sunday estimates followed on Sundays. No single public resource had done this before at that pace.

  The site grew outward in every direction. Gray published daily newspaper listings, release schedules, and charts sorting films by genre, all-time performance, actor, and director. Weekend charts eventually stretched back to 1982, giving the site a historical depth that a purely news-oriented publication could not match. The international section grew to cover the weekly box office of fifty countries, and results from up to 107 countries eventually appeared on the site. For anyone trying to understand how a film performed not just in the United States but globally, Box Office Mojo became the first place to look.

• 3. Community and Commerce

  ›

  In 2002, Gray brought in Sean Saulsbury as a partner, and the two grew the site's readership to nearly two million. A thriving message board culture took root alongside the data. From 2002 to 2011, those forums counted more than 16,500 registered users debating opening weekends, tracking legs, and comparing international performances.

  Also in 2003, the site introduced Premier Pass, a subscription tier that put certain data and features behind a paywall. It was an early experiment in a recurring question the site would face repeatedly: how much of the archive should be free, and how much should fund the operation? The tension between open access and sustainable revenue would follow Box Office Mojo for the next two decades. The forums themselves closed on the 2nd of November 2011, and users were directed to IMDb's own message boards, which in turn closed on the 20th of February 2017.

• 4. Amazon Enters the Picture

  ›

  In July 2008, Amazon purchased Box Office Mojo through its subsidiary IMDb. The acquisition brought an immediate change to the subscription model: Premier Pass features and content became free to all visitors. For readers, the deal looked generous at first.

  The integration deepened over the following years. Starting on the 10th of October 2014, many traffic reports on Box Office Mojo were redirected to IMDb's own box office page, though the redirect reversed the following day. It was a brief glimpse of how the parent company might eventually treat the brand it had absorbed. Gray's original project, built from daily forecasts and sourced grosses, now sat inside one of the internet's largest entertainment databases.

• 5. Redesign and Backlash

  ›

  On the 23rd of October 2019, Box Office Mojo launched a substantial redesign that visually aligned the site with IMDb. The rebrand gave it a new name: Box Office Mojo by IMDbPro. Along with the new look came a new paywall. Data that had long been free, including box-office figures for franchises, genres, actors, filmmakers, distributors, budgets, and inflation-adjusted totals, moved behind IMDbPro's subscription tier. Critics of the change noted the irony: the site was effectively returning to the Premier Pass model that had existed between 2003 and 2009, the period before Amazon had made everything free.

  The redesign drew heavy criticism for being difficult to navigate. Users who had spent years relying on the site's layout found key features harder to reach and much of the archive monetized. On the 31st of March 2020, the company reversed course on some of those restrictions. Brand, franchise, and genre lists came back out from behind the paywall and were reorganized under a new section called Indices.