The Batman Makes Box Office & Streaming Comparisons Entirely Pointless
The pandemic's effect on the theatrical box office and streaming platforms changed the way box office and streaming data is viewed, but The Batman's release made it so those numbers can't be used to compare movie performance anymore. The movie industry is changing in many ways, and thanks to a few of those changes, it's harder than ever to understand how movies are performing commercially.
The Batman is hardly the first big movie to see a unique release plan since the COVID 19 pandemic, but its particular distribution model coupled with its seemingly huge performance at both the box office and on HBO Max just 45 days after hitting the big screen, it proves a mixed model will work. Unfortunately, the precedent set by The Batman's success will likely cause a trend that effectively scrambles the longest trusted indicators of a movie's financial impact.
Related: Why The Batman's Box Office Is So Much Lower Than Spider-Man: No Way Home
Historical movie box office data goes back as old as the early 20th century, and while changes in market size, increases in ticket prices, inflation, and other factors make comparison across time tricky, box office data was still used as a rough rule of thumb for measuring a movie's theatrical performance. The emergence of streaming platforms also makes movie performance hard to measure because, while more data about audience behavior is available than ever before, it's hard to know for sure what any of it means since it's all private info selectively released by the streaming platforms.
Differences in the post-pandemic box office make it hard to compare a movie's performance against movies from before the temporary shut down of most of the theatrical inustry. Even movies being released
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