Boxoffice Pro

• 1. Introduction

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  Boxoffice Pro covers the business of running movie theatres, not the movies playing inside them. It began in 1920 under a different name, The Reel Journal, at a time when the film industry looked nothing like it does now. That original name did not survive, and neither did some of what later filled its pages. What led the magazine to abandon its own name, not once but twice, on its way to becoming tied to an entire industry group? Why did a publication that once reviewed films for its readers eventually stop? And who has been paying to keep it in print for more than a hundred years?

• 2. A Name For Every Era

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  In 1931, the magazine set its founding title aside and took a new one: Boxoffice. The word tied it directly to ticket sales and the theatre business it served, rather than to filmmaking itself.

  Its readership was made up of theatre owners and film professionals, not the general audience buying tickets. In 2019, the name changed again to Boxoffice Pro, a small addition that signaled a sharper focus on that professional readership. That professional focus would soon put the magazine at the center of a much larger organization representing the theatre business as a whole.

• 3. The Trade Group's Magazine

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  In 2006, Boxoffice Pro became the official publication of the National Association of Theatre Owners. That status placed the magazine at the center of an industry group representing theatre owners nationwide, rather than functioning as an independent trade voice.

  In 2012, the magazine stopped publishing movie reviews altogether, closing out a practice it had kept for decades. Its focus had already shifted years earlier toward something more concrete than critical opinion: hard numbers from ticket sales.

• 4. Charting The Box Office

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  Since 1937, Boxoffice Pro has published box office reports, tracking how films performed in theatres week to week. Performance was measured as a percentage of normal business, with an average week counted as 100 percent.

  Every January, the magazine released a Barometer issue, reviewing how movies had performed across the entire previous year. That yearly accounting depended on a publishing schedule and a corporate ownership structure that would themselves change more than once.

• 5. New Ownership Arrives

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  Associated Publications originally published the magazine every Saturday. That weekly schedule ran for years before the ownership behind it changed entirely.

  In 2015, the French company Webedia acquired Boxoffice, bringing the magazine under new corporate ownership for the first time in decades. Today it is published by The Boxoffice Company, a Webedia unit, through BoxOffice Media LP. That name now appears on every issue theatre owners receive.