Why Is ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Projected to Set Records?

Savvy moviegoers may have noticed that these are very uncertain times at the box office. Not only are ticket sales this summer down about 17 percent compared to last year, according to Comscore, but it seems challenging to anticipate what will hit and what will flop.

The domestic opening-weekend totals for would-be tent poles “The Fall Guy” and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” came in lower than expected, while “A Quiet Place: Day One” and last weekend’s “Twisters” far exceeded their estimates.

So how do Hollywood studios and their analysts make these predictions? And what explains why they fail?

Box office projections, typically derived from more general audience sentiment data known as “tracking,” have been a fixture of the industry since the 1980s. The idea that studios should know in advance how a film will perform — down to a specific dollar figure — was promoted by the Coca-Cola Company, which bought Columbia Pictures in 1982 and thought it should be run more like a conventional maker of consumer products.

“They were used to certain metrics of units sold,” said Kevin Goetz, the founder and chief executive of the analytics firm Screen Engine/ASI and the author of “Audience-ology.” “They pushed the National Research Group to come up with an estimate figure for their movies, and thus began what is essentially a parlor game of predictions.”

How Does Tracking Work?

To get a dollar estimate for a given movie, tracking companies poll prospective audience members weeks or even months in advance. Their questions are designed to gauge three metrics: awareness, interest and choice, meaning where the film ranks among others the respondent is interested in seeing.