In the late 1980s, Hollywood marketers tossed aside a legacy of secrecy and turned box office grosses into public sport. Entertainment Tonight began doing spots on the weekend’s top-grossing films.
TV newscasts soon followed. By 1991, all of the major studios agreed to make numbers available after decades of revealing only the positive — even though this era of transparency exposed them to headlines about box office bombs.
These days, Hollywood returns to original form when it comes to grosses for premium video on demand, a platform that came into its own when the novel coronavirus pandemic resulted in cinema closures and the shattering of theatrical windows.
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