I love that old classic Looney Tunes little where Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck argue back and forth about whether it is rabbit hunting season or duck hunting season. Their goal is to avoid the wrath of Elmer Fudd’s gun. Any argument can and will be made to keep them alive. Unsurprisingly, that 1951 scene is eerily reflective of today’s Hollywood. All stakeholders in the entertainment industry—studios, movie theaters, broadcasters—work toward different goals. That means they all have different definitions of success. Combined with Hollywood’s unparalleled PR spin, consensus is hard to come by as a result.
The best is still there, but every success story comes with asterisks, caveats and qualifiers. The box office is hovering around 15 percent below pre-pandemic levels globally and around 20 percent domestically. From 2014 to 2019, 28 Hollywood films crossed the $1 billion mark at the box office. Five years ago, as of this writing? Only 11. Broadcasting success can be measured and debated endlessly Good Mind-esque permissions. Total hours watched, total views, unique families, termination rates, subscriber acquisition and retention, engagement among high-risk users…I need an Ambien thinking about it.
No one can agree on which metric is the most important.
As Comscore’s head of entertainment marketing Paul Dergarabedian told the Observer: “It depends on who you’re talking to—audiences, studios, theaters, financiers.
Success is then compared to the present
Despite the best accounting efforts of popular Hollywood, success has been relatively straightforward throughout the history of cinema. The film was released, ticket sales were tallied, and the market made a decision. Bob is your uncle.
The 2010s, when the annual domestic box office increased by $11 billion five years in a row, were much easier to read. The opening weekend and gross relative to the budget were widely accepted evaluation tools.
Similarly, the first circulation of gold revolved around binary equations. By mid-2022, Wall Street rewarded Netflix with consistent subscriber growth. The broadcaster’s quarterly earnings were hyped by the media like a draft pick list (I was guilty too). It was an easy and fun narrative to sell.
However, no framework works as cleanly as before. As Wolk notes, “The industry has never had the patience to let a show or a movie find an audience. They want immediate metrics.”
Studio success = life cycle monetization
Home entertainment, such as VHS and DVD, long served as a financial safety net. The collapse of this market, coupled with the growing fragmentation of Hollywood, has increased the importance of multi-window success.
Digital and streaming claw back value in new ways. For Sony Madam Webb flopped at the box office, but it was the studio’s most-watched film on Netflix in 2024. F1: Film it was a box office hit, but did not make Nielsen’s Top 10 weekly streaming charts. Greenland 2: Migration struggled in theaters, yet ranked in the Top 10 for digital rentals/purchases across Amazon, Apple TV, Google and Rakuten TV as of this writing, FlixPatrol. Theatrical whiffs can become streaming hits. Streaming flops can be outsourced. It goes around as the studios have to evaluate the long life cycle of the work to understand the contributions of a certain title.
They don’t take revenge-Level hits move the needle more than anything. But at the studio level, success often comes from maximizing power across as many windows as possible rather than dominating just one.
Broadcast success = retention
Broadcast growth has slowed significantly in recent years. Plenty of streaming performance data available. But context does not.
Samba TV has just announced that it is the first episode of Apple Margo Has Money Problems viewed by 1.2 million US households, yet no time frame, according to Entertainment Strategy Guy he revealed. Netflix he boasted in its latest Inclusion report that non-English programming accounts for more than one-third of all global viewing. However viewing of top non-English shows is relatively easy compared to that of their English counterparts.
Data-driven arguments criticizing failure and heralding success are easy to assemble. For example, the studio behind Show A announced that it drew 7.5 million viewers in its first five days, while Show B has never made the Nielsen broadcast list in two seasons. Which one would you like to have? Trick question, both Daredevil: Born Again. The industry has yet to establish a clean inspection rubric.
Data from Digital i shows that nearly one-third of streaming viewers by 2025 were driven by customers at high risk of canceling their subscriptions due to low usage. At the same time, a handful of elite shows are able to grow their audience over the course of the season. Topic-level ratings are still very important. Games are not renewed if their views do not support the budget. But the overall success of the platform has less to do with the performance of a single show and more to do with what viewers do after watching.
TVRev founder and media analyst Alan Wolk breaks down what the officials are indeed they want to see: “The most important metric is the one that’s notoriously difficult to measure—attention. In the world of feudal media, it’s not how many people see your series or movie, but how much they like it.”
Small, targeted audiences, even if they are at high risk of cancellation, can be more valuable under the right circumstances than large audiences of passive consumers. Greater success now revolves around retention, churn reduction, and ongoing engagement rather than raw access and growth at all costs.
Exhibitor success = stability
Movie theater owners loved it Barbenheimer. But do you know what they love more than a weekend of uncertainty? Consistency.
Predictors protect against negativity by planning for predictability. I opening weekend is still important. But according to Dergarabedian, it’s not the most important metric.
“The most accurate measure of success is how long it stays in the top five or 10, how it holds up week after week,” he said. “It’s a direct reflection of how the audience feels about the film.”
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania...We’ve seen big openings followed by disastrous drops that cut off the office’s legs and spoiled stories. Exhibitors will trade in large power fluctuations to ensure robust life. Again, their definition of success is different from their colleagues.
Costs
Why is this lack of mutual understanding even more important? It’s not just a blur of post-performance analysis on our end. Without agreed-upon benchmarks for success, decision-making that empowers creativity across development, budget, distribution and beyond can be severely stalled.
Studios need titles that have the power to hit every window. Eye film projectors deliver guaranteed results. Broadcasters want to keep you in their digital ecosystem as long as possible. Marketing departments are trying to get viewers into a frenzy for the first weekend. Sony is lamenting the box office bomb, while Netflix may be happy. Different departments work on different goals at the same time. If no one can agree on what makes for success, you may just have a recipe for failure.
