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Rebuilding UK Box Office

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About two years ago, I launched the UK Box Office dashboard. It was a simple web app that I built to track the box office figures for UK films.

The new UK Box Office dashboard is the only place you can find box office data this easily.

Box office is the one metric that counts in cinema - despite hype, critics, and marketing; audiences are always the great leveller. I check the latest numbers every week, but unfortunately this still means comparing excel sheets to see what's going on. So I finally got round to spending a weekend making it much easier, and more fun.

This was a few weeks before COVID-19 shut down cinemas in the UK, and rendered it pretty much useless.

Downtime during the pandemic did give me room to rebuild it from scratch.

It's now live at boxofficedata.co.uk

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  • It's much much faster, loading the last year of data in under a second.
  • You can link directly to films, distributors, and time periods.
  • Full featured search.
  • Export data to CSV, JSON, and Excel.
  • Ability to create reports, for example the Distributor Market Share.
  • Experiment with other ideas, like forecasting and comparisons.
  • Public API for external use.

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Overall, it's much more inline with tools like Box Office Mojo, and The Numbers. Except in £, and with data with no gaps, right back to 2001. Much more inline with box office mojo, and The Numbers. In £, and much more data.

You can read a technical write-up of how it works over here.