Gross Receipts

Box office, baby!

Gross receipts usually refers to the total take from the theatrical feature film box office. That's the $16 you just spent for a ticket to see the next Marvel Whatever movie. The number doesn't include the sales of popcorn and Coke and Twizzlers. The number is also just the total revenues to the film retailer or exhibitor. That number has massively little to do with what the star of the movie was actually paid. In fact, theaters take something close to half of that number, so if a given "hit" film did U.S. domestic gross receipts of $120 million, then the theaters in the U.S. probably kept $60 mil and the distributor/financier kept $60 million. Out of that $60 million, they probably paid the sales force who sold the movie into the theaters something like $15 million. Then the film had to be advertised on TV (and a few other places) so add another $25 million in those costs, leaving just $20 million to make the film.