CinemaScore

CinemaScore is an American film polls critical marketing research firm made by Ed Mintz in 1979 and based in Las Vegas. It surveys film audiences to rate their viewing experiences with letter grades, reports the results, and forecasts box office receipts based on the data.
== Background ==
Ed Mintz founded CinemaScore in 1979 after disliking The Cheap Detective despite being a fan of Neil Simon, and hearing another disappointed attendee wanting to hear the opinions of ordinary people instead of critics. A Yom Kippur donation card with tabs inspired the survey cards given to audience members. The company conducts surveys to 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.
CinemaScore pollster Dede Gilmore reported the trend in 1993, "Most movies get easily a B-plus. I think people come wanting the entertainment. They have high expectations. They're more lenient with their grades. But as (moviegoers) do it more and more, they get to be stronger critics". In 1993, films that were graded with an A included Scent of a Woman, A Few Good Men and Falling Down. Films graded with a B included Sommersby and Untamed Heart. A C-grade film for the year was Body of Evidence.
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. A website was launched by CinemaScore in 1999, 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. 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.
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.
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.
Since July 2014, CinemaScore reports its results also on Twitter, and from January 16, 2016, it began with Collateral Beauty to use for each of them an image with the movie poster on the left and the grade obtained on the right.[failed verification]
Usually, 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 optionally contract with CinemaScore for a private survey, whose result would be disclosed only to the client.
== Rating ==
CinemaScore describes itself as "the industry leader in measuring movie appeal". There are 35 to 45 teams of CinemaScore representatives present in 25 large cities across North America. Each Friday, representatives in five randomly chosen cities give opening-day audiences a small survey card. The card asks for age, gender, a grade for the film ("A", "B", "C", "D" or "F"), whether they would rent or buy the film on DVD or Blu-ray, why they chose the film and whether or not they felt the film lined up with its marketing. CinemaScore typically receives about 400 cards per film; the company estimates a 65% response rate and 6% margin of error.
An overall grade of "A+" and "F" is calculated as the average of the grades given by responders. In this case, grades other than "F" are qualified with a plus (high end), minus (low end) or neither (middle). The ratings are divided by gender and age groups (under 21, 21–34, 35 and up). Film studios and other subscribers receive the data at about 11 pm Pacific Time. CinemaScore publishes letter grades to the public on social media and, although the detailed data is proprietary, the grades become widely shared in the media and the industry. Subsequent advertisements for highly ranked films often cite their CinemaScore grades.
As opening-night audiences are presumably more enthusiastic about a film than ordinary patrons, a "C" grade from them is – according to the Los Angeles Times – "bad news, the equivalent of a failing grade". According to Ed Mintz, "A's generally are good, B's generally are shaky, and C's are terrible. D's and F's, they shouldn't have made the movie, or they promoted it funny and the absolute wrong crowd got into it". Horror films consistently score lower; The Conjuring's "A−"was the first time a horror film scored better than "B+". CinemaScore's Harold Mintz said that "An F in a horror film is equivalent to a B− in a comedy".
An "A+" grade from CinemaScore for a film typically predicts a successful box office. From 1982 to August 2011, only 52 films (about two a year) received the top grade, including seven Academy Award for Best Picture winners. From 2000 to January 2020, there were 53 movies with "A+". As of July 15, 2020, about 90 films have received "A+".
From 2004 to 2014, those rated "A+" and "A" had multiples of 4.8 and 3.6, respectively, while C-rated films' total revenue was 2.5 times their opening weekend. Ed Mintz cited Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Cruise as the "two stars, it doesn't matter how bad the film is, they can pull (the projections) up". (DiCaprio's Shutter Island had a 3.1 revenue multiple despite a "C+" grade, and Cruise's Vanilla Sky had a 4 multiple with a "D" grade.)
As of 2020, 21 films have received an "F" grade from CinemaScore. Vulture wrote that besides horror, Another type of movie features prominently on the list: let's call it "Misleading Auteurism." These are movies made by prominent, often Oscar-nominated directors that investigate risky and controversial subject matters and receive both praise and pans. But because of how the movie industry works — the name of a director alone not being enough to get most people to go see something — they tend to be marketed as more straight-ahead genre films, resulting in a whole bunch of misled and pissed-off audience members.
Vulture cited as examples of such F-graded films Steven Soderbergh's Solaris with George Clooney, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly with Brad Pitt, and Darren Aronofsky's Mother! with Jennifer Lawrence.
In an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Martin Scorsese strongly criticized this type of approach by writing: "The brutal judgmentalism that has made opening-weekend grosses into a bloodthirsty spectator sport seems to have encouraged an even more brutal approach to film reviewing. I'm talking about market research firms like CinemaScore [...]. They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film. The filmmaker is reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer." Harold Mintz of CinemaScore rejected being lumped in with Rotten Tomatoes, and defended their methodology of polling select audiences on the opening night of a film, to see if the film meets the expectations of the people who most want to see it, and further defended the accuracy of their data and the correlation to box office results.
CinemaScore's forecasts for box-office receipts based on the surveys are, according to the Los Angeles Times, "surprisingly accurate" as "most of [the company's] picks...are in the ballpark", in 2009 correctly predicting the success of The Hangover and the failure of Land of the Lost. Hollywood executives are divided on CinemaScore's accuracy. One told Deadline Hollywood "It's not always right, but it's a pretty good indicator. I rely on it", while another said that competitor PostTrak was "much better...more thorough and in-depth".
=== List of A+ Score Films ===
No.	Year	Title 	Director
1 	1982	E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 	Steven Spielberg
2 	1982	Gandhi 	Richard Attenborough
3 	1982	Rocky III 	Sylvester Stallone
4 	1986	Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home 	Leonard Nimoy
5 	1987	The Princess Bride 	Rob Reiner
6 	1988	Die Hard 	John McTiernan
7 	1989	Dead Poets Society 	Peter Weir
8 	1989	Driving Miss Daisy 	Bruce Beresford
9 	1989	A Dry White Season 	Euzhan Palcy
10 	1989	Lean on Me 	John G. Avildsen
11 	1989	Lethal Weapon 2 	Richard Donner
12 	1989	When Harry Met Sally... 	Rob Reiner
13 	1990	Dances with Wolves 	Kevin Costner
14 	1991	Beauty and the Beast 	
* Gary Trousdale
* Kirk Wise
15 	1991	Terminator 2: Judgment Day 	James Cameron
16 	1992	Aladdin 	
* Ron Clements
* John Musker
17 	1992	A Few Good Men 	Rob Reiner
18 	1993	The Fugitive 	Andrew Davis
19 	1993	Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey 	Duwayne Dunham
20 	1993	The Joy Luck Club 	Wayne Wang
21 	1993	Schindler's List 	Steven Spielberg
22 	1994	Forrest Gump 	Robert Zemeckis
23 	1994	Iron Will 	Charles Haid
24 	1994	The Lion King 	
* Roger Allers
* Rob Minkoff
25 	1995	Mr. Holland's Opus 	Stephen Herek
26 	1997	Soul Food 	George Tillman Jr.
27 	1997	Titanic 	James Cameron
28 	1998	Mulan 	
* Tony Bancroft
* Barry Cook
29 	1999	Music of the Heart 	Wes Craven
30 	1997	Star Wars (1997 re-release) 	George Lucas
31 	1999	Toy Story 2 	John Lasseter
32 	2000	Finding Forrester 	Gus Van Sant
33 	2000	Remember the Titans 	Boaz Yakin
34 	2001	Monsters, Inc. 	Pete Docter
35 	2002	Antwone Fisher 	Denzel Washington
36 	2002	Drumline 	Charles Stone III
37 	2002	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 	Chris Columbus
38 	2003	Finding Nemo 	Andrew Stanton
39 	2003	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 	Peter Jackson
40 	2004	The Passion of the Christ 	Mel Gibson
41 	2004	The Incredibles 	Brad Bird
42 	2004	The Polar Express 	Robert Zemeckis
43 	2004	Ray 	Taylor Hackford
44 	2005	Dreamer 	John Gatins
45 	2005	Diary of a Mad Black Woman 	Darren Grant
46 	2005	Cinderella Man 	Ron Howard
47 	2005	The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe	Andrew Adamson
48 	2006	Akeelah and the Bee 	Doug Atchison
49 	2007	Why Did I Get Married? 	Tyler Perry
50 	2009	Up 	Pete Docter
51 	2009	The Blind Side 	John Lee Hancock
52 	2010	The King's Speech 	Tom Hooper
53 	2010	Tangled 	
* Nathan Greno
* Byron Howard
54 	2011	Soul Surfer 	Sean McNamara
55 	2011	Courageous 	Alex Kendrick
56 	2011	Dolphin Tale 	Charles Martin Smith
57 	2011	The Help 	Tate Taylor
58 	2012	The Avengers 	Joss Whedon
59 	2012	Argo 	Ben Affleck
60 	2013	42 	Brian Helgeland
61 	2013	Instructions Not Included 	Eugenio Derbez
62 	2013	The Best Man Holiday 	Malcolm D. Lee
63 	2013	Frozen 	
* Chris Buck
* Jennifer Lee
64 	2013	Lone Survivor 	Peter Berg
65 	2014	Selma 	Ava DuVernay
66 	2014	American Sniper 	Clint Eastwood
67 	2015	War Room 	Alex Kendrick
68 	2015	Woodlawn 	Erwin Brothers
69 	2016	Miracles from Heaven 	Patricia Riggen
70 	2016	Queen of Katwe 	Mira Nair
71 	2016	Hidden Figures 	Theodore Melfi
72 	2016	Patriots Day 	Peter Berg
73 	2017	Girls Trip 	Malcolm D. Lee
74 	2017	Wonder 	Stephen Chbosky
75 	2017	Coco 	Lee Unkrich
76 	2018	Black Panther 	Ryan Coogler
77 	2018	I Can Only Imagine 	Erwin Brothers
78 	2018	Love, Simon 	Greg Berlanti
79 	2018	Incredibles 2 	Brad Bird
80 	2018	The Hate U Give 	George Tillman Jr.
81 	2018	Green Book 	Peter Farrelly
82 	2018	Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 	
* Bob Persichetti
* Peter Ramsey
* Rodney Rothman
83 	2019	Unplanned 	
* Chuck Konzelman
* Cary Solomon
84 	2019	Avengers: Endgame 	
* Anthony Russo
* Joe Russo
85 	2019	Overcomer 	Alex Kendrick
86 	2019	Harriet 	Kasi Lemmons
87 	2019	Ford v Ferrari 	James Mangold
88 	2019	Just Mercy 	Destin Daniel Cretton
89 	2021	Summer of Soul 	Questlove
As of 2019, only two directors have made the list three times: Rob Reiner (1987, 1989, 1992) and Alex Kendrick (2011, 2015, 2019). The following directors have been on the list two times: Steven Spielberg (1982, 1993), James Cameron (1991, 1997), Robert Zemeckis (1994, 2004), Pete Docter (2001, 2009), Malcolm D. Lee (2013, 2017), Peter Berg (2013, 2016), Erwin Brothers (2015, 2018), Brad Bird (2004, 2018) & George Tillman Jr. (1997, 2018).
=== List of F Score Films ===
No.	Year	Title 	Director
1 	1984	Bolero 	John Derek
2 	1999	Eye of the Beholder 	Stephan Elliott
3 	2000	Dr. T and the Women 	Robert Altman
4 	2000	Lost Souls 	Janusz Kamiński
5 	2000	Lucky Numbers 	Nora Ephron
6 	2002	Darkness 	Jaume Balagueró
7 	2002	Fear Dot Com 	William Malone
8 	2002	Solaris 	Steven Soderbergh
9 	2003	In the Cut 	Jane Campion
10 	2005	Alone in the Dark 	Uwe Boll
11 	2005	Wolf Creek 	Greg McLean
12 	2006	Bug 	William Friedkin
13 	2006	The Wicker Man 	Neil LaBute
14 	2007	I Know Who Killed Me	Chris Sivertson
15 	2008	Disaster Movie 	Jason Friedberg
Aaron Seltzer
16 	2009	The Box 	Richard Kelly
17 	2011	Silent House 	Chris Kentis
Laura Lau
18 	2012	Killing Them Softly 	Andrew Dominik
19 	2012	The Devil Inside 	William Brent Bell
20 	2017	Mother! 	Darren Aronofsky
21 	2020	The Grudge 	Nicolas Pesce
22 	2020	The Turning 	Floria Sigismondi
*
Category:Film review websites