All Charts Are Political

In college radio promotion, there were ways to service copies to a smaller number of radio stations and still manage to make your way on to the playlist charts -- and getting charted could open up more airplay, more band bookings, more consignment record store placements, even the attention of acquisitions. It essentially broke down into alot of phone work (politicking with the radio stations to get on the playlist and politicking with the program managers about what they were going to report to CMJ) and some shameless self marketing ("#27 Song in the Midwest College Radio Charts of Stations With Under 10,000 Watts!! Go Us!!")

Film theatrical distribution is tracked in very different ways, ways that make them dominated by the distribution strategies that can throw the most money at them. The biggest way the charts from sources such as Neilson/EDI do this is by focusing the ranking order by "gross revenue." While I'm not one to diminish the value of gross revenue, at indieWIRE we still argued that we wanted a chart that was more porous ... that might actually allow self-distributed filmmakers, small distributors and Indiewood to compete on an equal footing on a meaningful statistic: "per screen average".

For us, that's a measure of efficiency and a measure of audience demand, it's not a description of who's on the top of heap money wise, it's a description of where people are lining up around the block to watch a film. And per-screen revenue drives alot of the thinking of even Hollywood distribution, especially among Indiewood distributors who dip their toe in the art film market for a film before opening it wider. It's even a useful Google phrase to find other analysis of box office results.

Most people don't realize that on indieWIRE we slice a lot of data with that measure ... we slice films (indieWIRE's #1 Indie Film this week is "Lost Boys of Sudan" on 1 screen with $7,485 per screen) ... we slice distributors (indieWIRE's #1 Indie Distributor this week is United Artists because of the film "Osama", even though that was the #2 film of the week.)

But charts are political, and they can be gamed, and that's what savvy entrepenuerial independents do.

Part of what makes the indieWIRE chart political is the constant discussion on what counts as independent (because there's never a clean line.) For example, at indieWIRE we're treating "The Passon of The Christ" as a independent film -- it was self-financed, it's being distributed by Newmarket Films on a straight service arrangement in their biggest distribution ever. Yeah, it's over 3,000 prints on over 4,600 screens and it's Mel Gibson, but it meets the test for independence. But if it doesn't keep a high per-screen average, it won't rank highly on indieWIRE's charts even if it brings in $30M over the weekend (because that would only be $6,521 per screen, which would have put them in fifth place this week.)

And the chart could be gamed. In fact, it's basically setup to be friendly to entrepenuerial gaming -- we want self-distributed filmmakers to report their box office figures to us, and bringing in $8,000 on one screen is deemed more important that bringing in $30M on 4,600 screens. And that's because our charts are meant to detect market efficiency and trending, not total revenue (if you had to produce millions of dollars of revenue in a weekend to get on the chart there wouldn't be many indies in that chart at all.)