When you book a cinema ticket online, the seat you pick turns grey for everyone else. That seat map is public. Boxoffy reads it — for every show of a film, in every cinema we can reach — and counts the grey seats. That is the Boxoffy Seat Count, and it is the base of every number on our live trackers.
1. Presales: what is booked before release
Before a film opens, we read every listed show's seat map on a schedule — across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, the Gulf, South-East Asia and more. Seats shown as taken are counted as sold. Seats a cinema holds back (house seats, blocked rows, the same block on every show of a room) are taken out, not counted.
Ticket value is tickets times the average ticket price we measure for that market and format — an IMAX seat is not priced like a standard one. For India, we follow BookMyShow and District counts with the leading trade sources, and show rupees first.
2. Actuals: what the film really sells
Once shows begin, presales are only part of the story: people also buy on the day, online and at the box office, and those buyers take a seat on the same seat map. So on show days we read each show again just before it starts — in the US every 20 minutes across every Fandango-listed cinema — and the seats taken at that last read are that show's actual audience.
3. Counted, estimated, official — always labelled
Counted is what we read seat by seat. Boxoffy estimate adds what we could not read — shows whose seat map did not load, cinemas that block automated reading, and late walk-ups after our last read — always shown as a range and never mixed into the counted figure. Official is the distributor's or industry service's reported number. When the official number comes out, it replaces ours.
4. Two methods must agree
Before we publish a forecast, we work it out two ways: bottom-up from the seat count, and top-down from presales using how comparable films converted. If the two agree within about 10%, we publish the range. If they don't, we publish the wider range and say why.
5. The accuracy log
Every call we publish goes into an accuracy log on the tracker — our number, when we said it, the official number and how far off we were. Misses stay up. That is the only honest way to earn trust in a number.
6. What we never do
We only read public pages. We never sign in, never create accounts, never select a seat, never put anything in a basket and never buy a ticket to see a number. If a cinema's site asks us to prove we are human or blocks us, we stop — that cinema is listed as not counted, and our estimate says so.
7. Where to see it live
The method runs live on the Ramayana tracker: final presales country by country, actual sales as each show plays, the chase against previous records, and the accuracy log. Every number carries the time it was read.
Source line you will see on our posts: Boxoffy seat-by-seat scan · BCM12 — our seat count, checked against approved trade and industry sources.