Record week at the box office, and not in a good way

$5,179 was earned last week at the United States box office. Not $5.179m, not $51.79k, but just over five thousand dollars. It's the worst week in history for the American theater industry, due to coronavirus restrictions and company policies that all but ended public movie attendance.

Okay, did some math. A movie ticket was ~35 in the 40s, which means collectively all theatres in America would only need to sell 14.5k tickets in a week to clear $5100

So now I'm thinking probably the box office hasn't been this low since the late 20s.

— Dan Olson (@FoldableHuman) April 1, 2020

A silver lining, perhaps: most movies on general release were shunted immediately to television-on-demand, and gave home movie services their best week ever. Read the rest