Hollywood Shorts Itself
Hollywood - for all its bright lights - still maintains a dense shroud of secrecy over how its net grosses are accounted for. The threat of fiscal transparency may have been a motivating factor in the industry sponsored provision outlawing movie-futures trading that was successfully lobbied into the July 21 federal financial reform bill. According to an article in New York Magazine about the failure of the proposed Hollywood Stock Exchange:
It’s not surprising that an industry steeped in financial shadiness feared such an idea. Despite the casual fluency with which many moviegoers now speak about per-screen averages and week-to-week holds, the way grosses are tallied is largely shielded from scrutiny. A company called Rentrak (which bought Nielsen’s box-office business) compiles the data, and the chief watchdogs preventing a studio from misreporting its grosses are … other studios.
