CinemaScore

Background[edit]

Ed Mintz, who majored in math at the University of Wisconsin-Madison^[1] and founded dental billing software company Dentametics,^[2] with wife Rona attended The Cheap Detective in June 1978. He had read a positive review by a movie critic but disliked the film despite being a fan of Neil Simon, and heard another disappointed attendee wanting to hear the opinions of ordinary people, not critics. Mintz had not worked with polls or the entertainment industry, but decided to use his math and computer skills for a business surveying the opinions of hundreds of film viewers.^[3][4]


A Yom Kippur donation card with tabs inspired the survey cards given to audience members. ^[3] The company conducts exit polls of audiences who have seen a film in theaters, asking them to rate the film and specifying what drew them to the film. Its results are published in Entertainment Weekly. CinemaScore also conducts surveys to determine audience interest in renting films on video, breaking the demographic down by age and sex and passing along information to video companies such as Fox Video Corporation.^[5]


After employees of Mintz's dental company tested the survey cards at theaters, polling began in 1979.^[1] CinemaScore at first reported its findings to consumers, including a newspaper column and a radio show. After 20th Century Fox approached the company in 1989, it began selling the data to studios instead.^[3][1] By the mid-1980s AMC Theatres used CinemaScore data when choosing films for its locations.^[2] A website was launched by CinemaScore in 1999,^[6] after three years' delay in which the president sought sponsorship from magazines and video companies. Brad Peppard was president of CinemaScore Online from 1999 to 2002.^[7] The website included a database of nearly 2,000 feature films and the audiences' reactions to them. Prior to the launch, CinemaScore results had been published in Las Vegas Review-Journal and Reno Gazette-Journal. CinemaScore's expansion to the Internet included a weekly email subscription for cinephiles to keep up with reports of audience reactions.^[8]


In 1999, CinemaScore was rating approximately 140 films a year, including 98–99% of major studio releases. For each film, employees polled 400–500 moviegoers in three of CinemaScore's 15 sites, which included the cities Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Dallas, Atlanta, Tampa, Phoenix, and Coral Springs.^[8]


In the summer of 2002, CinemaScore reported that the season had the biggest collective grade since 1995. In the summer of 2000, 25 out of 32 films received either an A or B grade. Twenty-six of the summer of 2001's 30 films got similar grades, while 32 of the summer of 2002's 34 films got similar grades, the latter being the highest ratio in a decade.^[9]


Since July 2014, CinemaScore reports its results also on Twitter.^[10]


Usually, to maintain comparable sample sizes, only films that open in more than 1,500 screens are polled and reported on CinemaScore's website and social media. The distributor of a film that opens in fewer screens can also contract with CinemaScore for a private survey, whose result would be disclosed only to the client.^[11] Some of these privately contracted surveys' results have nevertheless been publicly touted, such as the "A+" ratings for films including Courageous and A Question of Faith (both released by faith-based distributor Pure Flix Entertainment).