Every morning on my drive to work, I listen to the radio and they cover a few basic items:
- Weather.
- Local sports teams falling hopelessly short.
- Traffic Conditions.
- Gross sales of Movies…. WHAT?!
I can get that some people might work outside or have plans to work outside after work or whatever, and that somehow them telling you the traffic on your regular commute could somehow save you time if you could instantaneously divert your path. I can even see how people like to know local sports happenings to talk about in the elevator or whatever, but why why why!? Does anyone care about what the top grossing movie is? Does it make it a better movie if more people bought into the advertising and decided they needed to watch a movie the first week it came out, or that they are going again in the preceding weeks? I highly doubt it.
I doubt how much money a movie makes compared to others has any thing to do with the quality of movie, but rather the age groups interested in that movie. Turns out there are a lot of adult males 21+ that still haven’t gotten rid of their love of super heroes and comic books so anything involving the two is going to sell a lot of tickets. That’s independent of whether it’s worth the hour or so of your time to watch a rehashed super hero story.
On the other hand, I can see how displaying polling information or letting the people know what the “cool” people have done giving them guidance in their choices. Do cough up money to see a movie in theaters because “it’s supposed to be good” due to sales or because you assume you will like a common theme it shares and hope that it turns out that way? Do you really want to see a movie that has high repeat movie goers consisting mostly of teen girls?
